


The Currency of Heroes

by surreallis



Category: Law and Order: SVU
Genre: Alternate Universe, Angst, Codependency, F/M, Graphic Sex, Handcuffs, Partnership, Power Play, Restraint, Romance, Tattoos
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-04-19
Updated: 2010-04-19
Packaged: 2017-10-09 01:08:59
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 49,773
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/81369
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/surreallis/pseuds/surreallis
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Written for the '09 Kink-Bigbang on LJ. A season 2/3 rewrite AU in which Elliot is divorced before he and Olivia become partners. They have one very hard year where Elliot sinks and Olivia struggles to keep him above water. As his rage gets the better of him, she slowly learns how to handle him, and that maybe he's been her destination all along.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Eclipsed

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to Michelle for doing beta duties. And Anr for doing the artwork, which was beautiful. I just don't know if I can post it here somehow. Hmm. There are mentions of rape and child molestation in this fic, because of the job the detectives do, but nothing graphic or actually happening in real time. Some religious themes.
> 
> Based on eps: Taken, Victims, Paranoia, Countdown, Scourge and Wrath.
> 
> Originally published November 24, 2009

We're both broken in our own little ways. We're broken and we fit together just right. You know I saw the black inside your eyes. and I saw they were eclipsed. By mine. And they looked just right. When our lives meet, will you know me then? And will you want to know it? Feels like I've known you for so long. When our lives meet, will you love me then? And will you ever know it? Seems like you've known me for so long. You can't have everything you want when you want it. I will be everything you want when you want it. Wait for me. Just for me. Fall for me. Even when you don't know you fell from me. Will you fall for it? If this comes around again. Don't wait for me. Don't trust in me. Don't fall for me. Even when you know you're falling for me. When our hearts meet, will we make it right? Will we even notice that they are eclipsed? (eclipsed by evans blue)

Part One

[] [] []

She doesn't want to do this.

She doesn't want to stand in this funeral parlor and talk to her mother's friends and colleagues and be the faithful daughter. She keeps thinking about the case and how, well, damn inconvenient this is. How incredibly _selfish_ it was of her mother to die during an important case, and isn't that just like her anyway?

And then she feels the deep, sharp pain of guilt.

It's just that her mother's death has been an impending doom on her shoulders for years now. The fact that it's finally over is… a relief, really. And now she just wants to move forward.

"Look, Olivia," Cragen finally said to her after she tried to go back to work yet again too early. "You might not think you need to mourn, but you do."

And she has a responsibility, so she stands here and she greets people and she lets them tell her how amazing her mother was and how she'll be missed, and all her old anger bottles up inside her throat and makes her eyes wet.

Elliot hovers. For once she doesn't mind. In that freaky sixth sense they have of each other as partners, he knows when she's losing it and she feels his hand, warm and firm, on her bare nape, or on her shoulder, or on the small of her back. He has powerful hands, hard. She's spent a lot of time studying them over the years of their partnership. Over their desks as they do paperwork, on the steering wheel as he drives, around a perp's throat as he threatens. They aren't pretty or elegant or fine. They are scarred from his rage and muscled and veined, and sometimes he doesn't know his own strength when he grabs her by the back of the neck. But then he always softens and his grip is warm and his thumb moves gently and he is soothing.

There is something about his hands that makes her shiver.

He says more with his hands than he realizes, and reading each other has become second nature now.

Her mother's visitation feels torturous, and she lets him touch her as much as he wants, diverting her thoughts, making her feel like she still has someone in this world and she's not, now, all alone.

She can murmur to him when they have moments to themselves, and he doesn't care if she talks bad about her mother's old drinking buddies, or if she's sarcastic about her mother one minute and then desperate for her the next. He just says, "I know. I know."

And he walks the funeral parlor, paces like a bodyguard, taking on the role of her significant other, and really he sort of is. She is not dating anyone, although she is talking to a man named Michael on the phone, set up by a friend who is worried about her. They keep trying to set up a date, but her schedule never works out. Dating for both she and Elliot tends to be a precarious thing, complicated by the job and by each other. It takes more understanding than they're worth, she thinks.

It's easier just to stick together.

She watches as he paces, talking to her relatives and her friends, and she's grateful. Whenever she looks up she finds his blue eyes cemented on her. And it's soothing in a weird way, even though he is wire-taut and hawkish in his guardianship.

She is relieved when it is over. The mourners leave and she talks to the director about the plans for burial the next day, and then she goes into the dimly lit visitation room and says goodbye to her mother. Alone.

[]

When she walks outside, Elliot is waiting for her. He is leaning against his car, relaxed and loose now, and she is always struck by the difference in him between those times they are alone and when they are mixing with the rest of the world.

"I'll drive you home," he says.

She hesitates. "You don't have to," she says. "The walk will do me good."

He thinks about this for a moment, his eyes falling over her face. "I'll drive you home," he repeats, softly this time.

So, she goes, and he opens the car door for her, and she slides into the passenger seat and then she kind of collapses a bit.

He gets in and shuts the door, shutting the city noise out and the silence in, but he doesn't start the car. And that's okay. She feels comfortable with him, even if she doesn't with herself.

"Okay?" he asks in that rasp he has.

She doesn't know how to answer that. Her eyes are burning and her sinuses are filling and her throat is getting tighter, and the hot tears are going to start sliding down her face any second, and she cannot look at him. So she just shakes her head and then tucks her chin down and tries to cry as quietly as she can.

"Olivia," he says, and then he seems to run out of words. His hand finds the back of her neck, and she squeezes her eyes shut and the darkness helps. Everything is so jumbled inside of her.

"Take me home," she finally says, whispering so her voice doesn't crack.

And he starts the car and drives.

[]

He'd worried her in the beginning, when she'd first transferred in. She was new and eager and desperate to make a difference, as if she could fight her own demons, and her mother's, by putting every rapist she could behind bars. Her past would be erased and her life would be born again, and she would have happy memories instead of the weight of her mother's alcoholism, her mother's tragedy.

She'd known Elliot by reputation, both good (dedicated, intense, heroic) and bad (violent, whack job, psychopath). He'd been in the department for five years already by the time she'd arrived, and he was an intimidating force. Cragen had handed her off on day one and said, "You're with Stabler now." And maybe he'd known all along.

She and Elliot had sized each other up, and then they'd fallen in together like they'd come from the same blood.

"For better or worse," Elliot always told her, wearing out that old metaphor that cops use, comparing partnership to marriage. His own had fallen by the wayside before she'd come along, the job taking its toll. She wonders sometimes how things would have been different if he'd still been married. She knows his kids, has met his ex, but he is the eye of the storm.

She trusts him more than maybe any other person on the planet. But that brings a whole slew of issues along with it. He has a lot of power over her. Power he doesn't even realize he has. Feeling vulnerable is something she hates, and she does feel vulnerable around him, even with that trust. Even with all their history. Even when he begs her to tell him what's on her mind.

There is a dark part inside of her. A part that grew up a survivor and fought for her own place in the world. A dark part that is still very angry at her mother. A part that knows she is different, even though she doesn't want to be, and no one can really love her, because no one can really know her.

Elliot has that same darkness, and she has always felt it. On that first day of their partnership after visiting a victim, she sat beside him in the car and she felt that rage and that intensity simmering inside of him, just below the surface. She felt it charging the air between them, and it made her jumpy and nervous. She put her hand on his bare forearm and felt the hard muscle under his skin, felt it flex and tighten along with his anger, and she said, "Easy, Elliot." Like she knew him.

And he hadn't looked at her, but she'd heard him swallow, and his scarred hands had loosened on the steering wheel.

From that day forward, they'd been partners. And maybe something more that she'd always been afraid of, but never quite been able to resist.

 

[]

He doesn't say anything when he parks on her street. He just gets out of the car and follows her to her apartment, so she doesn't say anything either. In truth she's a little afraid of being alone with her own brain tonight.

She kicks her shoes off as soon as they get in the door, and all she wants is to wipe her make-up off and shower away the perfume and the smell of the funeral parlor and the tangle of scents in her head that belong to her mother's life.

There is a message from Michael on her machine that she ignores, and across the room Elliot clenches his teeth, the muscles in his jaw jumping. She ignores that too.

Elliot takes his jacket off and his tie and he unbuttons the top of his shirt and pushes his sleeves up, and then he pours a few fingers of Scotch into two tumblers and brings one out to her. He sits beside her and sips the Scotch and he exhales slowly.

She stares at the amber liquor in the glass, watching the way it shines and moves as she swirls it slowly. Without drinking it, she can imagine the way it tastes, the way it flows into her mouth and heats her blood. How it dulls the worst pain and allows escape. In that moment she sees why her mother succumbed.

"You wanna talk?" Elliot asks.

She frowns absently, captivated by the Scotch as it swirls, and then shakes her head. She doesn't know what to say. She doesn't even know where to start. Elliot knows her mother was an alcoholic. He knows a few of the stories of her youth. He knows her biggest secret, which really isn't a secret at all. Her mother was raped, and she is the product of that rape, but that is not what ruined her life. What ruined her life is the love affair her mother had with alcohol.

"Well, if you do…" Elliot says, quietly, and she knows. She knows. She loves him for that. His mother is still alive. His father is long dead. She knows enough to realize his father was hard and unforgiving, and that it didn't matter. The complicated relationships between fathers and sons, mother and daughters, any child and their parent, is the mold that shapes them. Elliot's rage comes from a place deep inside of him that was there long before she was. Put there by someone she never knew.

She quickly throws back the glass of Scotch and lets it burn all the way down her throat. She forces herself not to cough and her eyes water. Elliot takes the glass from her.

"I'm going to take a shower," she says, and she doesn't wait to hear any reply.

[]

The hot water is soothing and cleansing, and as the debris of the day is washed away, she feels lighter. As her mind clears, she gets tired. She puts on clean sleep pants and a soft T-shirt and when she goes out to the living room, Elliot is sprawled over her sofa and her coffee table, in his undershirt, with the TV on. He doesn't have the news on; it's some movie about the end of the world. There's a lot of snow and good-looking young people in love, and it's suitably distracting.

She sits on the sofa next to him, and he doesn't tell her he's staying and she doesn't ask. She knows he is, and that he'll take her silence on the matter as consent.

She falls asleep sometime during the last half hour of the movie.

[]

When she wakes, it is still dark.

The TV is off and her sofa blanket is wrapped around her. When she looks at the time, it is 4 a.m. She has a few hours to sleep yet before having to go to the burial.

Elliot is not there, but she sees his jacket and his dress shirt still draped over one of her armchairs. The sight of his clothes tossed so casually on her furniture is… an oddly warm feeling. She doesn't always like to think about it, but she is aware that there is dangerous ground between them. That she finds him gut-wrenchingly attractive on many different levels, and their job and partnership has both intensified that, and raised the stakes between them to frightening levels. She knows, purely by instinct, that he feels the same, and it makes her feel like they're trapped in a plane, doomed to crash, slowly and inevitably.

She gets up, keeping the blanket wrapped around her, and walks through the silent darkness of her apartment.

Elliot is lying on her bed, asleep, and she figures he hadn't wanted to wake her, so he'd let her stretch out on the sofa and covered her.

He's in his dark dress slacks and his white T-shirt and he's on top of her blankets. He exudes heat like a bonfire, so she's not surprised. He has one arm bent up over his head, and his biceps bulge, even in rest. She can see the dark smudge of his USMC tattoo on his forearm. He rests his other hand on his own chest, and she feels that shiver as she gazes at him.

He is simultaneously the least complicated relationship she's ever had, and the most complicated. Partnerships can be intense. There is a bond you form with your partner when you face death down everyday that is unique and very heavy. The trust required can push you over the line. She knows this well, and yet can't seem to rise above.

When she steps into the room, the floor creaks, and he wakes suddenly, his eyes opening and finding her in the darkness. He looks at her for a moment and shifts and asks in a sleepy rasp, "Okay?"

"Yeah," she replies, quietly, and then she walks to the bed and curls up next him on her side, keeping the blanket wrapped warmly around her. He smells like her soap. He must have taken a shower while she was out cold.

He takes a long, deep breath and relaxes, eyes shut again, and says, "I can go with you this morning. Cap'll be okay with it."

His eyes are still closed, so she lets her gaze run over his hair-roughened jaw and down over his throat, over the scarred knuckles of the hand that rests on his chest. "No," she says. "We've got a lot of work to do on this case, El. You go to work, and I'll be there after lunch."

He opens his eyes and glances at her. "Olivia…"

"I'm okay."

He holds her gaze for a long time, and she tucks one elbow under her head and sighs.

"Okay," he finally says.

They're silent for a few long moments, and then she says, "I felt relief when Cragen told me she was dead."

He stares up at the ceiling and she watches his chest move up and down with his breath. Then he turns on his side, facing her and says, "Tell me."

"I've been waiting for her to die for a long time," she says, quietly, and just saying the words brings the burn back to her eyes. "Since the first time she passed out on me when I was a kid, and I couldn't wake her up. Now that it's finally happened, I just…" She tries to breathe evenly.

He shifts, and he's touching her suddenly, his hand on her head, sweeping the hair from her face. "What?"

"All I can think is, thank God. Now I can finally stop waiting and move on." She swallows then, and closes her eyes because they're too wet and it's all piling up in her mind and making her head hurt, and she presses her fingers against her eyelids.

His thumb brushes her eyebrow, and then his fingertips smooth over the bridge of her nose and over her own fingertips, over her closed eyes. She freezes and her breath stops, the way it always does when he does something soft, something gentle that always seems so unlike him, and so very much in character at the same time. She doesn't want to move, doesn't want to look at him, afraid he'll stop.

"When my dad died," he says. "It was a weight off my shoulders."

She drops her fingers and opens her eyes, and his hand slides to the side of her neck, his fingers curling warmly and resting against her nape. In the darkness she can still see the blue of his eyes.

"Not that I wasn't sad," he continues. "But it felt like a cord had been cut. Like I could walk away." He frowns a bit, his eyes narrowing in that intense way he has, and she fights the urge to smooth down that deep crease between his eyes. "And like I was destroyed." He pauses, his gaze distant. "I could never please him…" He trails away, still frowning.

She doesn't know what to say, and she doesn't think he's expecting her to say anything anyway, so she just looks at him, and he looks back, and it goes on for a long time. Too long to just brush it away again.

When he moves closer, she doesn't say anything. She just shifts to accommodate him and rests easily in his arms and with his hand dragging up and down her back, she slips into that nebulous area between sleep and consciousness. And she stays there until her alarm goes off and she has to get up and bury her mother.

[]

She goes back to work that afternoon, and she is melancholy. Watching the dirt pile up on top of her mother's coffin has brought a weight down to bear. Something she had expected but hadn't really felt until that moment. Serena wasn't the greatest mother in the world, but she was all Olivia had. Her childhood hadn't been ideal, but it could have been worse. So very much worse. That much has been driven home to her a hundredfold while working in SVU.

When she sees Elliot, he holds her gaze and she sees worry in his eyes, and then something else. Something that acknowledges that they slept in the same bed last night, even though they hadn't had sex, and that it was over the line. And it's now their secret. He doesn't look guilty though, and he doesn't look concerned. At least not about that.

He has to go into interrogation right away, and she doesn't speak to him, but later he comes up behind her while she's sitting in a nearly-empty squad room doing paperwork, and he puts his hand on the back of her neck.

"How'd it go?" he asks, quietly.

She nods against the pressure on her nape, feeling his skin rub against hers. His hand always feels huge there. Like he could snap her in two. "Okay," she says. Then she shrugs, a bit more ambiguously. "You know," she says. He buried his father. He knows.

"I know," he agrees, and his fingers curl into the muscle at the base of her neck and tighten.

She nods, silently, and goes back to her paperwork, but she doesn't shoo him away, and he stands there for several long minutes, hand on her neck, thumb rubbing gently over the point of bone there on her nape. She doesn't really know what she's writing until he finally gives her shoulder a squeeze and then walks away.

[]

They're okay for a while, existing in that vexing in between, where she can meet his gaze and know there is more than partnership there, but that it will stay properly buried.

Really. If someone is not capable of compartmentalizing their feelings then they have no business in this job.

Their relationship has always been seasonal. They can rage at each other, cold like the darkest storm, and then ten minutes later the skies have cleared and the breeze is warm. One moment they are fire and sparks and violence and heat, and the next they are quiet and soft and slow and smooth.

"You two are like an old married couple," Munch always says, and he shakes his head and smiles at them like he knows a secret they don't.

They roll their eyes at him, but in truth she feels it. A connection that binds more tightly than rope.

In the twilight of winter, before the snow, Elliot cuts his hand while they're on a case and then pulls a bleeding woman from a bathtub before she dies, his bandages soaked in her blood. In the hospital the doctor tells them she was HIV positive.

Olivia can barely process the information. When she glances at Elliot, his face is stone. Too still to be anything but a mask.

_Oh shit_, she thinks. And her heart pounds. There are risks they take, as detectives, as public servants. The obvious ones are always less startling than the less obvious. Elliot tries to save a woman's life, and now he might pay for that with his own. Not the quick, brief pain of a bullet, but the long, slow knowledge that there is an end coming.

She knows him, and she knows trying to talk to him about it when it's so new in his mind would be asking for trouble. She focuses on the case so he doesn't have to, even though he seems to keep his head in the game pretty well.

He can't get in to see his doctor for two days, and she and Cragen watch him fidget and lose his train of thought. She tries to take him for a drink after work, but he avoids her and she has no idea what he's really feeling, and it hurts.

The doctor gives him anti-viral meds and tells him to come back in a month for testing. The chance he's contracted the virus through his thick bandages is remote, but…

When she finally corners him and demands to know what he's feeling, prepared for his fury, he gives her a faint smile and he shrugs. "We'll see," he says, as if it doesn't bother him at all.

That alone scares her out of her wits.

[]

The meds make him sick.

She sits in the car and waits as Elliot empties his stomach in an alley, and it's hard to see him like this. She doesn't react except to ask him if he's okay, and he brushes her off with embarrassment and anger, because he hates for anyone to see him this way and he's scared, she knows.

He stays stony and hard, and it's only in the small moments that she can see the toll the worry is taking on him. It's only in the rare moments that she can even _see_ the worry in his eyes. She doesn't even know how to reassure him, if it's even possible. He's thinking about it more than he lets on, she's sure of that, but he clearly doesn't want to talk about it, and when she tries to just be with him, keep him from at least being alone, he walks away from her.

He's preparing himself, she thinks, for the worst. She knows people who have HIV. She even knows people who have full blown AIDS. She has known people who have died. And humans can adjust to anything. People do what they have to do in order to live their life, no matter how long it might last. But she knows Elliot, and he will let this eat him up.

So, it's no surprise when Rick, a bartender at a little dive bar down from the precinct, calls one night and tells her Elliot is there. It's a place they go more often than not because it doesn't fill up with cops after the day shift. She's never stopped to really wonder why that's something that attracts them.

"He don't look right, Olivia," the bartender says. "He's worrying me a little. He's been here every night for a week."

She says she'll come down and get him, and the bartender thanks her, relieved, and she sighs and puts her coat on and walks downstairs to get a cab.

[]

When she walks into the bar, the place is busy. The music is loud and the air is hot and smoky and there are too many bodies in front of the bar and crowded around the pool tables. She glances behind the bar and Rick points toward the corner.

Elliot is sitting in a booth by himself, a glass of something amber in front of him. There's a bubble around him, where no one stands, and she can feel his desolation from across the room.

When she slides in the booth across from him, he doesn't even register surprise.

"Did Rick call you?" He tilts the glass in his fingers, watching it intently.

"Yeah," she says. "You drunk?"

He huffs out a short laugh at that. "Been trying," he admits. "Threw it all up."

She sighs.

They are very alike in some ways. For both of them the first instinct when trouble comes calling is to turn it inward and lock it inside, to not let anyone else see what they're feeling and be affected.

"You're going to be okay," she says, finally. Quietly.

He looks at her, and starts to nod, starts to smile, humoring her. And then it all fades away and he is weary. She can see the weight on his soul and the misery in his eyes, and he sets his elbows on the table and presses the heels of his hands into his eyes and she sees him swallow.

She reaches over then, to those scarred, rough hands and curls her fingers around his. "Come on," she says, and she stands, tugging at him.

He gets up and follows her, lets her lead him outside into the cold and then into the depths of a warm taxi. He sits close to her, and they are silent, and she watches the neon reflections in the windshield as they pass by clubs and restaurants and streets where people are alive and unaware. Her thigh is pressed warmly against his, and she can hear him breathing and she feels so protective of him that she almost can't stand it.

The taxi takes them to her place, and they walk up in the glaring lights of her hallway, to her door.

It's a lot like the night before her mother's funeral. He takes his coat off and sits on her sofa, and she sits beside him and they watch Leno.

"I'm tired," he finally says as the credits roll. "And we've got court tomorrow."

She nods and goes to wash her face and brush her teeth, and she changes into her sleep wear, and when she comes out he's in his boxer briefs and the apartment is dark.

"You want me to sleep on the couch?" he asks. And it feels like all the air goes out of the room.

"Do you want to sleep on the couch?" she asks, because this thing between them scares her a bit. There's so much weight there. So much potential injury.

He looks at her a moment and then says, "No." And his voice is rough and low.

She bites her lip and studies him in the darkness. The shadows curve around his body and turn it to chiseled stone. His chest moves with his breath, and she thinks that he is so very alive right now.

"Okay," she says, feeling a little like she's just cheated on a test, and she walks into her bedroom and slips into bed. He slides in beside her and the light from the streetlamps filters in through her blinds and lays across them, lengthwise, in wide stripes. He turns toward her on his side, and she can see the curve of muscle in his arms, the tattoo of the crucifixion on his shoulder, the line of his jaw.

"In three months I'll know for sure," he says.

"You're fine," she says, vehemently.

"Fuck," he swears.

She puts a hand on his neck, nestled right under that jaw line. "You're fine," she says again, gentler this time. "And even if you're not…" She doesn't want to finish that.

"The last time I was here," he says softly, and she feels the vibration of his voice through her hand. "I should have…" he trails off, but she can see his eyes moving over her face, and the images of what exactly he should have done go slipping through her mind.

_Hot, wet, fast, slow, hard, soft, good, good, good._

She wants to say that he will have that chance again, but the words stick in her throat. Everything is already so heavy between them. The world and the job and the case seem very far away.

She kisses him.

She curls her fingers around his nape and puts her mouth on his and she kisses him. She slides her tongue between his lips and she hears him inhale through his nose, and then, for a moment, his mouth opens and he is kissing her back. His mouth is hot and wet and strong with the whiskey he was drinking and his lips are soft and something flares up in her belly and burns hotly.

His hand slides over her throat, and then up to her chin, and then his fingers tighten and he pushes her away. "Olivia… fuck!"

She knows instantly what he's worried about, and maybe that was half the reason she chose this moment to kiss him. "You're fine," she repeats. "And even if you aren't, you don't get HIV from kissing someone."

"It's not a given," he growls. "You know that."

She breathes deeply and rests her head on the pillow, looking at him in the darkness. "I'll risk it." She doesn't think she's really risking anything. He's fine. She knows he is. He _has_ to be.

"I won't," he warns. "I couldn't live with myself if you…" He exhales hard, not able to complete his thought. "It's hard enough thinking about myself," he continues, and he's angry, distraught. "I can't… I just can't… "

She watches his jaw flex in his agitation, and she grabs him by the nape again. "Okay," she says, vehemently. Acquiescing. "Elliot, okay."

He stops talking but his breathing is still loud. His eyes are shadowed but intense.

She softens her voice, tries to calm him. "Okay."

Under her touch he stills, but she feels how taut he is, how closed off he's become, and restrained. She rubs small circles against the back of his neck and he closes his eyes briefly and swallows, affected.

She's affected too, if she's being honest, and maybe this is the year for honesty. His muscled curves are familiar, even in the darkness, and her attraction to him flashes bright.

She slides her hand from his nape to his jaw and slowly moves her fingers against the stubble on his chin, exploring. He takes a long, slow breath and his brows furrow and he shifts slightly, uneasily, but he doesn't reach for her or protest, and she thinks he's probably afraid to touch her. She drags her fingertips over his upper lip, following the shadow of his unshaven beard. She has stared at his face more times than she can count over the years, and she has never touched him quite like this.

_God_, she thinks. She can feel the desperation and the fear and the anger and the frustration rolling off of him, and he holds himself still under her touch, as restrained as if she's tied him. She hasn't, but the threat of the disease has, and she feels a warmth. She rarely fears his violence, even when she probably should, and yet having it so open to her now, so safe when he is the most on edge she has ever seen him, is… intoxicating. In that same rush of emotions, she wants to protect him and reassure him and she lays her palm against his cheek.

"Olivia," he says, and he sounds confused and guarded.

"I promise," she says, quietly. "I won't go too far."

He stares at her, jaw tight under her palm.

"Do you trust me?" she asks, and she knows he does, but having him admit it is something satisfying.

He looks at her for a long time, like he's trying to read her. "Yes," he says.

"Then trust me," she says, and she slides her hand down over his throat, feeling the corded muscle there, the movement as he swallows again, the line where the stubble of his beard ends and the smooth skin begins.

It doesn't seem like a big step, considering. But somewhere in the back of her mind she realizes that she is erasing a line that maybe shouldn't be erased. And the worst part is that it feels organic. It feels natural and unforced, and that's been the way of their partnership forever.

He shifts again, and in the silence of the room she hears him exhale slowly as she traces the straight edge of his collarbone.

For detectives who specialize in victims where consent is a big issue, she realizes the two of them have so many blurry lines that it's almost ironic.

"You can say no," she says softly, feeling very odd that she feels she has to. But between the two of them she is quite sure that it is she who is better at standing her ground. She has power over him too…

He doesn't say no. He gets very quiet and very still and she can tell he's clenching his jaw tight as he tries to breathe normally, but he doesn't refuse or protest, and so she keeps going.

She slides the pads of her fingers over his shoulder. In the strip of light lying across them she can see the dark outline of his crucifixion tattoo, and she runs her fingertips along its edges. His relationship with religion has always fascinated her. In some ways she thinks he uses it as a comfort, as a justification that some things are out of his control. In other ways she thinks it's much deeper and she will never truly understand it. He is a strange tangle of blatant sex and violence mixed with innocence and a desire for salvation. Religion has never been much of a presence in her life. Sometimes she envies him and his faith.

She can feel every beat of her own heart, and the warm surge outward as she touches him. Her gaze is tilted down and his breath is stirring the hair on the top of her head, and when she glances carefully up at his face, his eyes are closed.

His body is flexed and tense though. And he is very awake.

She smoothes her hand over the curve of his bicep, and the muscle is heavy and rock hard. Then the valley of his elbow and down over the hair-rough thickness of his forearms. She can feel each long, striated muscle there, down to his wrists, where she can feel the bulge and give of his veins.

She touches his hand briefly, barely brushing her fingertips over the ridge of scars on his knuckles before the warmth washes over her and she almost shivers, and she has to force her touch back up to safer territory.

She touches his chest then, and he takes a deep breath, until he's pushing against her hand. She slowly slides her palm down through the sparse hair on his stomach, and she hears the click of saliva in his throat. She can see by dropping her gaze that he's hard, the bulging curve of his erection evident through his boxer briefs. It makes the breath stop in her lungs for a moment.

She can feel the slight indentations between his abs, and he isn't cut the way statues are cut, but he's better. He's warm and solid and tense with power, and he's real. She feels the soft, thicker line of hair running down from his navel, and she follows it until her fingertips bump the waistband of his briefs.

His knuckles crack as he makes a fist.

She is risking a lot now, and he trusts her, but she's not sure she trusts herself.

She hesitates, but then slides her fingers along the waistband to his hip and then she is slipping her fingers underneath the briefs, following the furrow between his hip and his groin, and she knows his butterfly tattoo is there, right at the top of his thigh. She imagines she can feel the edges, just barely raised, but it's probably all in her mind. He showed it to her in the locker room once, back before any of this became dangerous. He'd pulled his sweatpants down over one hip and showed her the thick lines of an old tattoo that had been done by a cheap artist, and she'd smirked at the evidence of his youthful sexuality. As if putting an image next to his dick would have women dying to get in his pants. He'd grinned wolfishly at her and shrugged, and it'd been hard to tear her eyes away from the ink, and from the slightly thicker patch of hair he was flashing her with by showing her. And then she hadn't been so sure he wasn't on to something.

She stops on that tattoo, just resting her fingers there, and she can feel the heat of his skin and the rough scrape of the hair that starts just there, and the fabric of his briefs stretches up and away from her hand, proving just how aroused he really is, and she swallows.

"Liv," he says, roughly and breathlessly, and she hears the restraint in his voice. "You have to stop now."

She closes her eyes for a moment, the heat between her legs thrumming and her desire for him feeling like the heavy haze of an addictive drug. Maybe like the warm wash of alcohol that brought her mother down. She feels the temptation like a physical blow.

She could touch him. She could convince him, and he'd probably let her do it. She has no cuts on her hands or on her arm, and she could make him come and he'd enjoy it. And then… he'd never trust her again.

She carefully slides her hand back and rests it on his hip, benignly.

He exhales, hard, and his whole body slumps in relief.

She realizes she'd been holding her breath too, and she lets it out, feeling the weariness leak back into her muscles.

"I'm sorry," she says, because she feels like she has to.

He makes a soft, dismissive sound, and then he suddenly moves close and wraps his arms around her, and she relaxes into him. His chest moves up and down against her, and she can still feel him, hard and arching, against her belly, and so she tries not to shift. She slides her arm over his waist and against his back.

They cannot ignore this, she realizes. And she doesn't know if she really intended this or not.

He softens a bit against her, and his body jerks as he falls into sleep. She tightens her hold on him and closes her eyes.

[]

As winter wears out, the city is hit by a cold snap, their breath becoming white mist in the air. They start a long rotation of working nights, and that's always been the preferred shift of rapists anyway.

He's still stopping the car to throw up in alleys, still looking pale and haggard when the morning starts creeping up on them. He refuses to go home though, and she knows he just needs to keep himself busy so he doesn't think about the HIV.

He falls asleep at her apartment a few mornings, when he's too tired to go home, but he always sleeps on her couch, and he's always gone when she wakes up. They aren't ignoring what's happened, so much, because she sees it clearly when their gazes meet. But he's preoccupied, and she can't blame him. She thinks that maybe they're both waiting for the other to say something, but neither of them knows what to say.

Partners get attracted. They sleep together. Sometimes they fall in love, but she has no idea what this really is. And just thinking about changing the status quo now makes her feel a little panicky. This job is her calling. At the end of the day, it makes her feel as if her life is worth it. As if everything she went through as a child had a purpose. And she _likes_ having Elliot as a partner.

So, she just keeps working, and while things have changed, they also stay the same, and that's okay.

For a while it even feels like things might _be _okay.

They can work together during the day, and she only has to think about him in that other way at night, when she's alone and he can't see her face.

And then they find Karen Smythe, her mentor, raped and beaten in a stairwell, and there are cops involved, and they are both dealing with a world that is shifting beneath them. For a while, they are the way they used to be. Before.

[]

Karen is an interesting force in her life. Olivia's career in the New York Police Department has been full of partners and rivals, mentors and friends. Karen has been all of them at one time or another.

Finding out Karen had been working for the IAB the entire time is… confusing. And sometimes it seems like Olivia's whole life is full of complications. She feels resentful of the fact that Karen was lying to her—to everybody—since the beginning, but she understands the reasoning. And it's not like she's ever had anything to hide. She doesn't like dirty cops, and she wants them ferreted out.

All the same, the IAB makes her stomach turn a bit.

When Karen's case is finally over, she feels more settled. Like everything is in its place. She goes to Karen's apartment to truly make peace, and they fall back into their old roles. Karen has always been the first, and most important, mentor. Elliot has taken on that role the past few years, and like Karen he's also so much more.

She's always been aware on some level that she and Elliot show too much, but she doesn't realize how much until she hugs Karen and is on her way out, and Karen stops her with a hand on the arm. "Olivia," she says, quietly. "Be careful."

Olivia frowns, speechless, because it sounds more ominous than usual, and Karen says, "Sleeping with your partner isn't the worst thing ever, believe me, but if someone wants to use it to knock you down, it'll work."

And Olivia freezes, feeling a rivulet of fear, because she and Elliot haven't even had sex, and she knows there are rumors—how could there not be—but she's always thought they were more… invisible.

"I'm not sleeping with Elliot," she insists, just as quietly. She is suddenly uneasy with Karen.

Karen's dark eyes stare into hers. "Fine. Just… be careful. There's going to come a time when you'll have to choose between him and your career."

And then she lets Olivia go, and shuts the door.

[]

It's almost anti-climactic when Elliot's results come back negative and she finds him eating breakfast one morning at his favorite diner. Although Karen's words of warning are still digging at her mind, her worldview feels solid again, and Elliot scarfing down an entire plate of eggs and bacon and pancakes is the best thing she's seen in weeks. She steals his orange juice, and he grins at her, and she smiles back.

They walk back to the precinct, and she matches strides with him, and the morning crowds kind of step aside for them, and she can't imagine being anywhere else but here, doing this job. With him.

And then, a few blocks from the station, he pulls her into an alley and she finds her back against a brick wall and his body against hers and he grabs her by the back of the neck and kisses her.

It's one brief, open-mouthed kiss, and she has time to meet his gaze as they part, and then he's kissing her again, and it's serious. His mouth is hard against hers and almost bruising, and he uses his lips and his tongue like he wants to devour her. She can barely keep up.

When she can't breathe any longer, she puts her palm on his cheek, sliding her thumb under his jaw, and she pulls her mouth away. "El…" she says, breathless. "God."

His breath is faster and a little heavy, and he doesn't back off. He stands right there, almost pushing her into the wall, his hand still on the back of her neck. "I'm not holding back anymore, Olivia," he says, just as breathless.

And she knows he means the HIV and the night he spent in her bed with her hand on his skin, and she figures she has to grant him this. She nods silently, and pulls her hand from his jaw, and he still stands there for a while just looking at her. "I can't forget about it," he says, softly.

She can't either, but she doesn't want to tell him that. Doesn't want to make this worse than it already is. Than she's already made it. She holds his gaze for a moment, and then she grabs his hand, briefly, tugging him toward the mouth of the alley. "Come on," she says, quietly. "We're going to be late."

He follows.

[]

It starts the way everything between them starts: suddenly and intensely.

One minute they seem the same as they've always been, friends and partners, the cases taking their toll, and the next they've charged over that thin blue line, running until their air is gone and their lungs ache.

Maybe it was inevitable. Maybe the day they met their paths were inexorably linked together. Sometimes it seems like the more they fight it, the more it settles more heavily onto their shoulders. The more it draws them together like a magnet and steel.

[]

It starts with a fight, in the middle of the squad room. A little girl escapes from a monster, and the monster finds a new little girl, and now they have 48 hours to find that new little girl. Or she dies.

It is chaos.

There are few leads and there is no rest, and they have to sleep in 30-minute shifts, and they have to imagine what is happening to that beautiful little girl right that minute. And the next minute. And the next.

She has to cancel on Michael again, and Elliot has to cancel on his kids, and things have been a little rough between them lately anyway, and she's not sure why.

They all lose it a little bit, but she and Elliot lose it spectacularly.

At first just with everyone else, and then, finally, with each other, and he gets sarcastic and condescending, so she tells him, "Screw you."

And he growls right back, "Screw you!" And he stalks right toward her, hardness in his eyes, so she gets ready for the fight, until Cragen separates them and sends her into the elevator to go down and get some air.

He catches up with her as she exits the stairs and bursts out into the garage. She's not surprised he dodged Cragen and came for her, but she's irritated. Can't they have one fucking minute apart?

He walks up on her like a hunting lion, all angry eyes and hard body language, and they walk side-by-side while she tries to ignore him, knowing that, more than anything, pisses him off. Especially when she does it.

"What's your fucking problem?" he growls.

"What's yours?" she snaps back. They're matching strides and her legs burn with the effort, and their voices echo off the pavement. He always parks on the lowest level where no one else parks, and it's like they're walking into a cave.

"If you're gonna break down under a little pressure like this, then maybe you oughtta find a job where people's lives aren't on the line."

A little pressure. Three days of no sleep and dead-ends and goddamn it, she _knows_ he's just trying to get to her, but she's proved herself again and again and she doesn't need to do it again. Especially not to him.

"Or maybe I just need a new partner," she snarls. "One who's not such an asshole." She's never threatened him with their partnership before, and in an abstract, detached part of her mind, she wonders how he'll react. She knows, through some sixth sense, that it will hurt him in the way she wants to hurt him at that moment.

She feels his fingers grasping at her wrist, and she jerks away from him, casting him a cold glance as she walks. But he makes a frustrated sound and grabs her arm, and her momentum runs up against his iron strength and her whole body whips back around to face him.

His jaw is tight and he glares at her and she can _feel_ the anger rolling off of him. He's leaning forward and his fingers are tight around her forearm and between them both the sound of their breath is loud in the quiet garage. She holds his gaze and he always looks at her like he wants to bite when he's angry. Like he wants to swallow her up.

"Maybe you do," he says, in that low, tight voice he uses on suspects. His gaze doesn't leave hers. "Maybe you can't hack it anymore with me."

She's never wanted to punch him more in their entire partnership. "Fuck you," she mutters.

He nods, mockingly. "Yeah. Fuck me."

She's swinging at him then, and she knows it will never land even before she starts, but it's completely impulsive and completely out of her control and oh god, oh god, this isn't _her_. Not at all.

He leans into it and knocks her blow down and then his arms are around her and she's struggling because she just wants to get out of there now. Away from him and the case and her own weary mind. But he's stronger than she is and she isn't willing to hurt him in the way she has to in order to get free and in moments he has her facing up against the wall of the garage, his hands pressing her wrists to the rough, cold cement, the warmth of his chest behind her. And it _hurts_ but not in the way he thinks when she winces and he eases up and then he says in her ear, "You wanna fight me, Liv?"

She does. And her anger keeps her up on a razor-thin edge, muscles tense and trembling, another _fuck you_ on the tip of her tongue.

"Huh?" he demands again. Quietly.

And she doesn't. Because there's still a little girl missing and the exhaustion is in her bones and he might be an asshole but he's still _Elliot_.

She gives in a bit, to the wall, leaning away from him as she rests her forehead against the cold cement. She closes her eyes against the burn of tiredness as her wrists slip from his grasp. He lets her go, sets his palms on the wall on either side of her. She brings her fists up to cushion her head from the wall, and then she rests. And hurts.

He breathes behind her for a while, not moving, and she can still feel his body heat and that weird energy between them that always flares in unexpected ways. Sometimes in dark ways. She's not exactly turned-on, but she's not exactly _not_ turned-on either.

And then she hears him swallow, hears the rough sound of frustration he makes, and his palm is crowning her head, his forehead coming to rest above her ear. He's warm and very close and his breath is hot against her neck and his voice is an ache. "Liv."

She says nothing for a moment, because she doesn't trust herself. They have an urgent, open case and he is all rage right now, and she is furious. But then she touches his hand where he has it splayed against the wall. She moves her fingers minutely until they skim over his knuckles, and she says, softly, "You're such a prick, Elliot." And she wants to laugh. Or cry.

Elliot's mouth is on her nape then. His hands brushing her hair up and away, his lips wet and warm and opening so he can taste her. It's like dropping from the sky without a parachute, sticking your hand in an open flame. It's sharp and sudden and fairly intense and it makes her almost gasp with how good it feels. It's something he shouldn't know, how sensitive her nape is, how good it always feels. But he does, of course, and that's why when he touches her his hand is always on her neck, isn't it?

He scrapes his teeth over her skin, sucks slowly, maybe too hard, and she feels overwhelmed by her own body. She arches her neck and leans back into him, and he slips one arm around her waist.

She hears the saliva in her own throat as she swallows, and nothing about this is comfortable or right, and the only thing keeping them from possibly being seen is a concrete pillar sticking out from the wall next to them.

It's still the anger and the frustration and maybe a little breakdown from the lack of sleep, but it's something else too, obviously, and it's something she's known was there. And this is Elliot's way of handling things. Not thinking, just doing, and that's the whole crux of her problem with this case anyway. She's hard-pressed to stop him.

She turns around, and his mouth drags over the line of her jaw until her lips brush his.

"You wanna leave me, Liv?" he asks, voice rough. He sounds furious. And hurt.

And, no, no, she doesn't. And fuck him for asking that when he already knows the answer. And fuck her for not stopping him, because she has that power.

She shakes her head in the wake of his breath, the sugar from his coffee making it sweet, and then she kisses him, and he kisses back with an intensity that makes her head spin. With his overcoat on, his shoulders seem a mile wide, and she curls her fingers into his short hair, grabbing at the strands even though they won't stay in her grasp.

His hands are digging under her coat, running everywhere like he owns a map, over her breasts, around her waist, grabbing at her hips. It's cold and yet she's hot with his heat all over her. He's unbuttoning her jeans, shoving his hand down the front of them, curling his fingers between her legs, and fuck, she 's so wet. There's no room between them for her own hands so she just circles his neck and slips her fingers under his collar. And she kisses him until her mouth aches.

When he slows a bit, grows softer, she tugs at his hair. She doesn't want comfort, and she suspects he doesn't either. She's still mad at him, mad at the case, furious at the pedophile that caused this whole thing. Angry at herself for falling into this trap. And, God, she wants him. She just wants him.

There's a small ledge next to them, where the empty parking spaces start, and he shoves her jeans down along with her underwear and then he grabs her and lifts her onto the ledge, crowding close between her knees so she doesn't slip off. He's working his belt and his badge is digging into her thigh, and for a moment she thinks _Jesus Christ, what the hell are we doing?_, and then he's dragging her hips forward, leaning into her, and oh…

Fuck…

He's inside her. And time stops for. One. Long. Moment.

He plants his hands on either side of her on the ledge and leans close, his breath loud, hard. He stares at her then, brows furrowed, eyes dark, and he swallows, and she knows, she knows, she _knows_. It can't be this for them, and it can't _not_ be, and…

_It happens_, she thinks. _It happens. It happens._

He moves then, hands sliding around her thighs, holding her against him while he rocks her against the wall. She grabs the back of his neck and presses her mouth to his collar and the only thing she can think about is the way he feels moving inside of her, the way he feels so big that it almost hurts and it's been a while for her, she's out of practice. It's an unbearable ache, a heat that makes her feel weirdly charged. He's panting now and his fingers are holding her so hard that the pain is mixing with the pleasure, and the sparks are firing behind her eyelids. She isn't sure if she's going to come hard or not at all.

He falters and she listens to his uneven breathing, and she knows he's going to come and she isn't. It feels too good, it's too right, it's too wrong, there's just too much of _him_. He's trying to slow down, and she knows why so she kisses him and steals some of his breath while she grabs his hips and pulls him deeper. He groans helplessly into her mouth, as submissive a sound as she's ever, _ever_ heard from him, and then he thrusts hard and comes.

She's still feeling that weird charge as he rests against her, his cheek against her temple as his breath slows. His back stiffens a little under her hands, and she hears his mouth work just above her ear.

"Liv," he says, and she hears it there, the apology. "You didn't—"

"Don't," she says, quickly. _God, don't._ "It's okay."

He steps back then, letting her slide down onto her feet, and she looks at him as she pulls her pants back up and buttons them. He's looking at her like he doesn't know who she is, and she has to resist the urge to snap at him. He tucks himself back in and buckles his belt, and she exhales slowly.

Jesus. She just had sex with her partner in the parking garage. She has Karen's warning ringing in her ears, and a date with Michael scheduled for tomorrow night, and she's just made things fifty times more complicated.

Before it can settle on her shoulders, her phone chirps, and it's Fin. She and Elliot start toward the car, and he grabs her before she gets in, his fingers painful around her elbow.

"We're not finished," he says, and his gaze is hard.

She wants to protest, but she doesn't. They aren't finished. Clearly.

She holds his gaze in silent agreement, and she wears his semen inside as they slide in the car and save a child's life.

[]

It is late by the time they have settled the case.

There is a crush of exhaustion after a bad case ends. The hours of not sleeping, the stress on their bodies and minds, all of it builds up and then comes crashing down once the worry and the intensity of their drive recedes.

He drives her home, late, and they have to get up early because there is still a lot of hard work to do, but they were silent the entire drive home, and now she sits quietly for a moment, waiting, as he shifts the car into park.

He doesn't look at her. He looks at the dashboard in her general direction, and she's never felt more awkward with him in her life.

"I could come up," he says in that low, rough voice he uses when he's trying to be careful around her.

She debates this in her head, because there is a part of her that really wants him to do just that. The other part that worries about her job is curiously quiet now. It happens, she reasons, and that's exactly what he'd told her when she'd gotten close to Brian Cassidy and then had a one-night-stand. It's the job, and sometimes it's tough, and sometimes things happen, and you shouldn't beat yourself up over it.

"It's been a rough year," she says, finally, thinking about her mother and Karen and his brush with HIV and this gut-wrenching case.

"Yeah," he agrees. "Every year it seems to get worse."

She swallows. "It's late, El."

She opens the door and starts to slide out, and his hand grabs at her shoulder suddenly, his fingers brushing her nape. "Olivia."

She hesitates for a moment, but doesn't glance back at him. It happens. It happens. It. Happens.

"Night, Elliot."

And then she gets out and his hand slips away.

[]


	2. Breathe Into Me

And this is how it looks when I am standing on the edge. And this is how I break apart when I finally hit the ground. And this is how it hurts when I pretend I don't feel any pain. And this is how I disappear when I throw myself away. Breathe your life into me, I can't feel you. I'm falling. Falling faster. Breathe your life into me. I still need you. I'm falling, falling. Breathe into me. (breathe into me by red)

 

Part Two

[]

They're sitting point for Munch and Fin on the Friday night a few weeks after they truly close the child abduction case . It's twilight, and they're stuck in the car together, and she just knows he's going to bring it up. She wonders if maybe she should head him off at the pass. _Hey, you know, that thing last week where we had sex? It happens. We can just forget about it._ Except, of course, she hasn't forgotten about it, and neither has he, and her dreams have been particularly vivid lately. The memory of waking up in the middle of the night already mid-orgasm kind of blows across her mind and makes her face heat up.

"Are we going to talk about this?" he finally asks, when it's fully dark and only the streetlights are giving meager illumination.

"Why should we?" she counters. "It happens, right?" She tries for nonchalance and keeps her gaze directed out the windshield.

He's silent for a moment. "You can't even look me in the eye, Olivia."

She bites the inside of her lip and knows he doesn't mean just tonight. He means the past week, and he's been trying to make eye contact with her for a long time now. Except every time he does, she sees all of it in his eyes and it sends everything inside of her into a hopeless tangle, so she just looks away. It wasn't even like they got drunk and fell into bed together one night. They fucked against the wall in the precinct's garage during a huge fight. That was just… What _was_ that?

She takes a breath, because as much as this whole thing might just scare her a bit, the thought of losing him scares her more. She looks at him.

His eyes are shadowed, but his jaw is loose. He's not angry, but…

"I don't regret it," he says, quietly. He doesn't ask if she does. "I mean, it could have happened in a more appropriate place, I know, but..." He trails away and holds her gaze. When she says nothing, he swallows and says, "It was going to fucking happen, Liv. It just was."

And she sighs. Maybe that's something they can agree on. She pauses, feeling the words stick in her throat. She's dangerously close to admitting something, and she's not even sure what. "I don't want to lose this job, El. It's everything to me."

"You won't lose this job. Hell, if it comes down to that, you tell them it was all me. Okay? It was all me."

She rubs wearily at her forehead. That won't work, and she suspects he knows that. She gives him a tired look but says nothing.

He looks at her a while, but when she won't look back, he faces forward again, and he says, with a low, forced voice, "We're not finished, Olivia."

[]

They spend nearly all night on the stakeout, and then catch a few hours of sleep in the crib until they're back at it by mid-morning on Saturday. Elliot has to cancel on his kids _again_ and it puts him in a dangerous mood.

She tries to leave him alone and not aggravate him, but it doesn't seem to matter much. She thinks they'll both have to take some vacation time soon, so he can spend some time with his kids and she can sleep. The job is kicking their asses this year…

When he pulls up to her apartment, finally, in the late afternoon, she sits for a moment trying to figure out what to say to him.

"Can I come up?" he asks instead. His voice is a tired rasp.

"I, uh…" She hesitates, not sure where this is going. But she doesn't really want to leave him, despite his sour mood, and she's not sure she can take another week of trying to avoid eye contact. "Sure."

He follows her up her stairs, and she unlocks the door, and he stands close behind her. She can hear him breathing and feel the heat of his body, and despite her weariness it starts a warmth in the pit of her stomach.

She opens the door and goes through, and he comes in behind her, and she can feel the tension coming off of him and she knows he isn't up here to talk.

She walks away from him and hears the door click closed behind him, and then his hand is sliding down her arm and grabbing her wrist and she turns to face him. He doesn't say anything. He just looks at her with hooded eyes and then pulls her closer, and then he leans down and kisses her, hard, mouth open and wet on hers. It isn't all that unexpected, really, after everything that's gone on between them, and her stomach flips slowly as his mouth moves on hers. She kisses him back.

His free hand slides down her other arm and closes around her wrist and then he's bending both of her arms behind her back and pushing her back against the wall, and she isn't afraid of him, but that little bit of aggression makes her feel eager. For him. For the fight. Sometimes they are so very alike.

He moves his mouth to her neck, drops her wrists long enough to slide his hands under her shirt, and his palms are electrical against her skin. Every soft, small hair on her skin stands up at the charge.

"El," she says, and it comes out a little more breathless than she'd planned. She really isn't sure if she's protesting or encouraging him.

"We're not finished," he says, and the baritone of his voice sounds loud against her ear.

His fingers drag the strap of her camisole down, and then his mouth finds the skin underneath and sucks warmly at it. She feels his teeth, briefly, and then he's leaning into her, laying his body right up against hers and grabbing her head, bringing her mouth to his again.

Really, all she can think about is how he felt inside of her in that fucking parking garage, and how much she wants to feel him again. That despite the lack of orgasm, it had been something devastating to her body. Maybe to her soul.

She breaks away from his kiss and grabs him by the arm, and he follows her silently into her bedroom.

He doesn't give her a chance to breathe. He covers her mouth, and his hands lift at her shirt, tug at her pants, slide underneath the fabric to dig into her bare skin, and she can feel the hard energy coming off of him. He isn't furious like before, but he's just as focused. He strips her shirt off, and then his mouth is hot against her breast, first one than the other, and she can feel the force of his breath against her skin. His own shirt and tie disappear, and his shoulders are smooth and hard under her hands. He drops lower, to his knees, and then her pants are being dragged down, and she lifts her feet to let them go. His fingers curl into her thighs, and his mouth drops on the skin of her inner thigh, and she realizes as she falls down onto the bed behind her that she's lost complete control of this situation. Her legs are still bent over the side of the bed, and he's kneeling between them, and it's startling when his mouth sucks at the crease between her thigh and her hip, and then his tongue suddenly finds her clit.

She jumps, against her will, and really all she wants is more, but he grabs her wrists again and slides them under her lower back, holding them there. It tilts her hips toward him and tightens the muscles in her arms and shoulders, and even in her back and stomach, and she can't move as easily. It's… shockingly arousing, and his tongue feels like heat and silk, and the pleasure rolls through her in waves, and she can't even form words in her mind. She can only think about the feeling between her legs and the way he feel so hot and how much she wants to come already.

She arches a bit against him, and his hands tighten around her wrists, and it hurts a bit, her muscles stretching to their limit, and it feels good in that weird way between pain and pleasure and sex and control, and she curls one leg around his back and pushes him toward her with her heel, and his whole mouth comes in to suck at her clit, and she only has time to gasp before she's pressing hard against his mouth and coming with an intensity that steals her breath and makes her dizzy with the heat.

It goes on.

Even after she starts breathing again.

And he finally stops when she sags beneath him.

_Christ._

She doesn't have the energy to do anything except lie there for a few minutes, waiting for her heart to stop pounding, and she feels his breath, hard and fast against her skin as he presses his forehead to her thigh and seems as helpless as she is.

"Well," she finally says, as the silence stretches on and her senses come back. "Does your ego feel better now?"

She feels him shake his head. "Liv…" And he swears, softly. And she wonders a bit at how much they drive the emotions in each other. How anger and sadness and desperation and even happiness seem to get so tangled up between them and feel so damn _heavy_.

She disengages from him and slides up onto her bed, collapsing bonelessly. "Not that I'm not appreciative…"

He sighs, heavily, and she listens as he shucks his boots onto the floor and then stands, and in the muted light of her bedroom his chest is golden. "You started this," he says. "Did you think I was just going to walk away, like Cassidy did? Fuck."

She did start it, she realizes. She ran her hands over his body and erased that line between them, and she may as well have pulled a trigger too, because stopping this felt like she was trying to stop a bullet.

"It happens," she says, quietly, throwing his own words back at him, and then adding her own. "You don't mean it to."

He climbs up on the bed in his jeans, shirtless and shoeless, and he straddles her hips. "And sometimes you do," he says, reminding her of the rest of his speech. His expression is sullen.

She puts her fingers on the button of his jeans. "We can't keep doing this," she says.

He takes her wrists carefully and pulls her hands away from him. He leans forward, pressing her arms over her head, and stares down at her. "We need each other, Olivia," he says softly. "This job is tearing us up. We need each other to survive."

The intensity of his gaze, his words, makes her mouth run dry. How have they fallen so far? "We need to have sex for the good of the job?" She tries for sarcasm and isn't sure she quite succeeds.

His jaw tightens and he stares at her for a long moment, before he swears. "Goddamn it. You can't do this, Liv. You can't touch me like you love me and fuck me like you hate me and then act as if it means nothing. You can't do that."

She doesn't know what to say to that. He's still holding her down, and she's starting to feel a little spooked. "It doesn't mean nothing, I just… It's complicated, Elliot. We go through so much together."

"That's why we work together, Liv, in so many ways. Because this job is tough, and we go through it together."

"That's just it," she finally whispers to him. "How much is just the job, and how much is real, El?"

"It's all real," he counters, and everything about his expression is hard and unforgiving. "Sometimes I wish this job wasn't, but it is. You can't wish it away, Olivia, this thing between us."

She fidgets, restlessly, and his hands tighten around her wrists. "You've been holding me down a lot lately." She tries to change the subject, feeling that weight between them crushing down.

"You keep running away from me."

"Maybe you should just tie me up. Give your arms a rest." She finds her sarcasm again.

He watches her for a moment, and then he releases her and his weight lifts as he leans over the side of the bed. She frowns, and then he settles back on top of her, his discarded tie in his hands. "Maybe I should," he says.

She snorts. "Tie me up, baby. I guess this night isn't done quite yet." She tries for a teasing tone, pleased that she's successfully diverting their talk away from emotions and back onto sex.

He smirks faintly. "Turnabout is fair play," he says.

She presses her arms by her side, apart. "I didn't actually tie you," she protests.

He lays the tie across her breasts and then braces his hands on either side of her head, so he can stare down at her from barely a foot above. "You might as well have, and you know it."

"You could have stopped me, Elliot, and you know _that_."

He furrows his brow. "I didn't _want_ to stop you. I wanted you to touch me. Christ, Liv. Of _course_ I did. What I didn't want was for you to take stupid risks."

She holds his gaze. "I didn't think it was stupid," she says.

His gaze trails over her face. "I trusted you when you asked. Now…" He sits back up again and picks up the tie. "Do you trust me?"

She feels a hollow drop in the pit of her stomach. Everything between them feels so urgent all the time. So powerful. It's tiring and overwhelming and addictive. He is her partner though, and of course she trusts him. "I wouldn't be partners with you if I didn't."

He smiles a little bit. "I know you trust me with a gun guarding your back. But do you trust me _here_?" He looks directly into her eyes.

She swallows, and hesitates. She is not afraid of him, or of sex, but there is something terrifying about how she feels around him. How much they share. How much she already needs him. "I…"

When she can't say anything else, he exhales. "Okay," he acquiesces. "I guess we'll have to work on that."

"I do trust you," she finally manages.

"Show me," he says, quietly, and he holds up the tie.

She hesitates again, but resisting him is sort of like resisting sleep, she realizes, after she's been up for three days on a case. Everything else kind of disappears for a while, and all she can feel is that slow burn behind her eyes. Pretty soon nothing else matters and she wakes up and realizes she doesn't even remember falling asleep.

She holds her wrists up, offering them to him, and his eyes seem to darken. He grows still and intense, and she holds his gaze, but just barely. He positions her hands, palms together, and then wraps the tie around her wrists, loosely, several times. Then he wraps each free end around the fabric between her wrists and ties it, so she's effectively cuffed. He pushes her arms over her head and leans over her. She feels the headboard against her fingers, but it's a solid block and provides no anchor for her bondage.

"Stay still," he orders, quietly, pressing her hands down into the mattress over her head. She swallows and leaves her hands in position. He sits back up and looks down at her, and she feels curiously exposed. She's never really been that troubled by her own nudity, but… It feels different when she's restrained.

Elliot knows more about her than anybody else in her life now, and the way he looks at her has her shifting beneath him, uneasily. She's dealt with enough cases in the S&amp;M world to know that people get into bondage for different reasons, but those who enjoy being tied like it because it makes them feel safe. It makes them feel wanted. Loved. She feels some of that, although she can't really tell if that's just Elliot or if it really is the act of tying her. But mostly she feels out of her own control and a little uneasy, and she thinks that maybe this is not really her thing.

"It's okay," he says, trying to reassure her, and then he leans down to kiss her. His mouth is warm and wet and hard, and her breath quickens. She arches up against him a bit, and twists, pushing her hip between his legs. He exhales into her mouth. His hands slide up to grab her wrists, just beneath where they're bound, and then he pushes down, pinning her. He sits up a bit and looks down at her, and he's all furrowed brows and ruthless gaze and a breathless voice. "You want a new partner, Olivia?"

The repercussions of their moment in the garage are going to linger for a while.

"No," she says, quietly. She strains against his weight a bit, but he keeps her locked down. "I was angry when I said that."

He's silent for a moment, and then, "Have you ever wanted to leave me?"

The way he phrases it… _Have you ever wanted to leave me?_ Like they're together. It sends a flash of panic, and of heat, through her blood. She hasn't really, although she thinks she should have. His reputation as an impulsive cop, a dangerous partner, is well earned. He's been through a lot of partners. And she's seen why. But she's never wanted to leave him. Somehow… they fit.

"You're the best partner I've ever had," she says. And then feels uncomfortable. Like she's just revealed too much.

"For better or worse," he reminds her, softly. His mouth brushes hers.

"You think we're taking this marriage metaphor thing a little too seriously?" she asks, wryly.

He huffs out a quiet laugh against her lips, but he doesn't reply. Instead he slides down a little bit and she feels his mouth close hotly around one nipple and he sucks at it, hard, and she inhales sharply and twists beneath him. "El… God."

He opens his mouth with a hard exhale and then he's licking over the nipple, then moving to the other. She arches her head back and shuts her eyes and every nerve ending in her body sings.

His fingers trace over her eyelids. She feels a ripple of excitement.

His touch is light, and it moves down to her mouth. He runs the tip of his middle finger over her lips. She looks up at him. He touches her cheek, his gaze following his fingers, and then his thumb settles on her lower lip, tracing slowly, and she opens her mouth slightly. He lets his thumb press in and brush over her teeth, against her tongue, and she closes her lips around it. His gaze shifts to her eyes and the muscles in his jaw flex. "Kathy hated my hands," he says, his voice a low, forced rasp. "She thought they made me look violent and rough."

She opens her mouth and he pulls his thumb back. She says, quietly, "I like your hands. Every shitty day of this job is marked on them."

He stares at her for a long moment, and then his mouth is on hers, and those scarred hands of his are running down over her throat, onto her shoulders, over her breasts. He shifts up, until he's on all fours above her, and traces her ribs and drags his knuckles over the soft skin at her waist. When he curls his fingers between her legs, she gasps, quietly. It hasn't been that long since he'd had his mouth there, and she's ready again. He slides two fingers into her and he moves them slowly, and it's not even a thrust, it's a caress. The heavy pleasure of sex settles between her legs, and she wonders what the hell was wrong with Kathy that she hated those hands. Jesus.

She just wants to touch him now, and she can't keep still, and he half sits on her legs so she has to lie there and take it, and she feels like she might go crazy. She can't open her legs to get more of his hand against her, and she can't arch up as the heat swallows her. She closes her eyes, and with her sight gone and her hands bound she starts to see the reason that people like this. Her heart pounds with anticipation, and with her eyes closed she doesn't know what he's going to do, but she can think of nothing else. There's nothing to focus on but what he's doing to her.

"It was a bad case, Olivia," he murmurs, leaning down over her to brush her mouth with his. And she knows he's talking about the case that had them fucking in the parking garage. As if there was any other on their minds.

"Yes," she agrees. She feels a little breathless.

"We have to cut ourselves some slack." He slides his mouth under her chin and pushes up, forcing her head back as he sucks at the skin there.

She's so focused on how good it feels that she can barely answer. "Yeah."

He slowly eases his weight up and slides onto his knees between her legs, as if he was going to fuck her. The stiff fabric of his jeans scratches against her inner thighs, and then his fingers dip inside of her. He moves slowly. So fucking slowly that she almost can't stand it. He braces himself on the bed with one hand and with the other he slides two fingers inside of her with such painstaking and minute movements that she finds herself breathing faster in anticipation. She still feels curiously exposed in a way she never has before, and she doesn't care anymore.

"Easy," he orders, and his voice is soothing. Low. Rough.

It creates sparks that fire along her spine and over her skin. She's used to the control. She's the one who takes control in sex, usually, and she's not sure why. She thinks it probably has something to do with trust, and she's never tried to fool herself into thinking she doesn't have trust issues. But she trusts Elliot, and this… God. This.

When his fingers are buried to the hilt, he presses against her, harder, trying to get just that much deeper, and she exhales and starts to bring her arms down, forgetting that they're bound.

"Fuck," she swears, breathlessly.

His breath heats up the skin of her cheek. "Trust me," he says, reminding her.

He moves then, easing his fingers in and out, and it's still not so much a stroke as it is a caress, and he learned a few things with his mouth, because he knows just where to touch her with his thumb. His mouth sucks at her neck, moves lower to her breasts, and it's almost too much. When she opens her eyes, he's a hulking shadow over her, and if he were anyone else she'd find it disturbing. But he's not, and all she can think is that this is Elliot. This is her partner doing these amazing things to her, and it's so very cliché and so fucking predictable, and she just doesn't care.

"We need each other, Liv," he says in a low, breathless rasp against her breast, and he twists his fingers inside of her, and she gasps and flexes, and she thinks she'd agree to anything right now if he'd only push her over that slow-building ledge of heat that's growing low and heavy between her legs.

She can't say anything without moaning, so she just nods her head, weakly, and he catches her mouth with his, his tongue sliding deep, and it takes her breath away. His fingers start a rhythmic motion, and he brushes her clit again and again with his thumb, and she just… Goes right over.

She tightens, tightens, and then the climax hits her, and her own breathing sounds loud as she rides it out, the waves of pleasure stealing everything but her ability to feel. She can hear Elliot breathing in her ear, roughly, and his words as he swears, "Fuck, Liv. Fuck."

And then she is too exhausted to do anything except go limp and catch her breath. His fingers slide out of her, and his weight lifts off her legs, and when she opens her eyes he's sliding down beside her and dragging his fingers over his tongue, and his gaze catches hers and holds, and he uses that wolfish grin she's come to know so well, and she thinks, _Jesus, Elliot._

But it's been a long day, and an even longer evening, and she feels in the back of her mind that she's told him things tonight she's never told anyone else. Things she's said without speaking. Things he asked, and she surrendered. She feels wrung out, and she knows it can't be even 7 o'clock yet, but she's so drained that she feels like she's in torpor. His fingers touch her wrists, and the tie loosens and then drops from her wrists, and she winces as she draws her arms back down. His palms cover her shoulders and knead a bit, and she exhales slowly. She thinks she really needs to return the favor and not fall asleep on him, but she jerks awake as he touches her, and it's already too late.

"It's okay," he murmurs, and his arm is warm around her.

Her muscles are weak, her endurance exhausted, and she closes her eyes.

"We can do this," she hears him whisper, feels his breath against her temple, but she is too tired to keep her eyes open.

So she sleeps.

[]

She wakes a few hours later to Elliot's mouth on her nape, his hands heavy in her hair, his legs tangling with hers.

Her body is slow to wake, but his tongue against her skin is already making her shiver, and he's naked now, his cock hot and hard against the curve of her ass, and the hair below his navel rough against the small of her back. She turns, and before she can even settle, he's pulling her against him, over him, as he shifts onto his back. She's still feeling languid and drained from earlier, but it's a good sort of pain, and she runs her hand between them, over him for the first time, and he's so hard she almost gasps.

He's wet at the tip already and he grits his teeth as she slides her hand around him. She remembers that while she's come twice, he hasn't at all, and she takes her hand away. He slides his between her legs, and when she finally slips down over him, she's wet, and she has to bite her lip as he fills her. It sends a fleeting memory of the parking garage through her mind, but then his hands grab her hips and his strength is iron as he controls her movements.

"I can't take much," he murmurs, as she leans down over him and moves shallowly, her mouth just above his. She kisses him softly.

The one and only time they'd fucked before this was a storm of anger and lust and it had been so unexpected that she'd barely known how to process it all. But she feels it all this time. Each give of her muscles, each movement of his, each tiny millimeter he sinks in deeper. He's thick enough to make it slightly uncomfortable at first, and that's always been her weakness. She moves slowly and kisses him when he lifts his mouth toward hers, and he's already breathing heavily, his fingers curling into her thighs almost painfully, so she slides one hand down between them to touch herself, and he swallows thickly, his eyes closed.

He comes first, trying to hold it back and not succeeding. He groans and almost lifts her into the air, and his hands hold her down on his hips, keeping him buried deep. She watches his face because he keeps his eyes closed, and his jaw flexes and then gets loose, and she comes after him, when he collapses back, panting, his erection just starting to wan. It's still enough to get her off, and she digs her forehead against his shoulder as she shudders against him. His hands ease off her hips and slide warmly up her back, and he rubs his thumb soothingly against her nape as she breathes into his skin and slowly relaxes.

It's a warm, languid moment and she can feel his affection for her, and for a moment she feels what it would be like, the two of them together. Really together. And she doesn't want to move, she doesn't even want to breathe…

"It isn't just the job, Olivia," he says, softly.

She thinks about this, but she doesn't know how to reply. "The job doesn't help," she finally says.

"If I quit…" he starts.

And she turns on him. "Do you want to quit?"

He looks at her, surprised. "No…" he says, slowly. "I want to do this job with you."

She sighs, but her cell phone chirps and she climbs off the bed, grimacing at the wetness between her legs. She doesn't even glance at the display before answering and regrets it when Michael's voice greets her.

"Oh," she exclaims, somewhat taken aback. "Hi." They'd finally met once, for coffee, but after canceling on him too many times, he'd backed off with his phone calls, and she hadn't pursued him. This thing between Elliot and her…

Elliot glances at her curiously, and she slips into the bathroom to clean up and allow herself a little privacy, and she feels like an idiot talking to one man when she's just had sex with another and is still in the process of wiping him off of her skin.

"Look," Michael says. "We've been putting this off long enough. Let's just meet next week for drinks, okay? We can talk then."

She hedges, because this is not at all fair to him, and she really needs to figure out what's going on between her and Elliot, but she's been talking on the phone to him for almost two months, and she feels like a brush off isn't what he deserves. "Okay," she says. "You're right."

"Good," he says, and she can hear the smile in his voice. "Looking forward to it."

"Yeah," she says, and she winces inwardly.

When she comes out, Elliot is sitting on the edge of her bed and he looks directly into her eyes. "Who was that?" he asks, and she can tell by the tightness of his jaw that he knows exactly who it was.

"Michael," she says, because she's never lied outright to Elliot before, and she's not going to start now.

He stares at her as she sets the cell down. "You're still dating him?"

She licks her lips nervously and turns to face him. "We haven't really started dating… Yet."

His face hardens.

"Well, it's just been so… complicated lately," she protests.

He glares now, and grabs a pillow off the bed, throwing it, hard, onto the floor. "Olivia," he growls. "Christ!"

"Elliot," she says. "I just… I don't even know what this is between us. And Michael and I have only met once. I haven't even had _time_ to think about him, much less talk to him lately."

"We're sleeping together, Liv," he says, and he's irritated.

She hesitates then, because she just can't untangle her thoughts. "Let's just… Can we just not rush things here?"

He furrows his brows in anger. "You want to have sex without strings, is that it?"

He says it so condescendingly that she bristles. "What," she demands. "You want to start dating now?"

He stares at her, and then he stands up and grabs his jeans. "Maybe I do," he growls, and he puts his legs into the jeans and pulls them up, tucking himself inside and buttoning the fly.

"Elliot," she says, placating. "I just… I'm not sure I can start something with you here and then walk out with you on the job and watch you face a bullet someday!"

"You're already doing it," he snaps.

"It's not the same!" she protests.

"It's not different either!" He glares at her. "I _liked_ being married, Olivia. I liked having someone there."

She feels a real fear then, that this has already gone way beyond her control. That they're spiraling down, down. Down to the ground. "Can we just… slow down?"

He clenches his jaw and then he seems to get ahold of himself. He stops dressing and watches her and then he walks right up to her until he's only inches away, looking down at her. "How do I make you feel, Liv?" It's a breathless question, quiet, and he's very, very serious.

_Good_, she thinks. _Powerful. Worried. Terrified._ She moves her mouth, but she can't speak.

"How do you really feel about me?" he demands, and the look in his eyes freezes the breath in her lungs.

But she looks at him in the golden light of her bedroom lamp and she doesn't know how to respond. He is different than anyone else in her job or her life, and she couldn't let him go if she tried. But he has so much power over her. So much damn power… He doesn't even realize. She can't answer. She isn't even sure of the answer. She isn't sure what belongs to the job and what belongs to him. So she stays silent.

He breathes against her skin and then he leans slowly forward until his forehead touches hers. He shakes his head. "Okay," he says, quietly. "Okay."

"El," she says, her voice almost a whisper.

He swallows. "I've had one-night stands before. I'm as capable as anyone of having strings-free sex, Olivia." He hesitates and meets her gaze with hard eyes. "But not with you."

And she has no idea what to say, but it doesn't matter. Because by then he's halfway across her living room floor. And moments later she hears her front door click shut behind him.

She listens to his footfalls as he goes down her stairs, and then her apartment is achingly silent.

[]

On Sunday, Cragen calls her early and tells her they caught a rape and she needs to go catch Elliot on his way out of church and get both their asses to the scene.

She glances at the clock and knows she has some time. Elliot keeps his phone turned off during church, and this is his weekend with the kids. Even if they hadn't had that fight on Friday night, he'd have been an absent presence in her life this weekend. Cragen usually tries to keep them off call on Elliot's weekends with the kids, but it just doesn't work out very often.

She takes a cab to the precinct and picks up a squad, and then she drives out to Queens. She knows his church, and she double parks across the street until a space opens up in front, some football fan looking to get out early, right after communion.

There's still melting on the streets, but it's sunny and warmer than it has been in a while, and she stares at the stone church, so similar to every other church in New York. Stained glass, big wooden doors and cement steps, and if she's silent she can hear the faint sound of singing. It mystifies her, the peace people find in churches.

She slips out of the car when the wooden doors open and people start walking out in their long coats and good clothes. She leans back against the car and watches and wonders how he'll receive her.

They've had plenty of fights over the years, gotten so angry with one another that they didn't speak for a day, but their job depends on their communication, so even when they're mad they still talk. Even if it's stilted and dismissive. And once the case gets hot or tiring or intense or even close to the end, they always fall back in as thick as thieves, as if nothing ever happened. And at the end of the day, one of them would glance over and say, "We good?" And the other would nod, and then they'd spend half the night talking over a beer, or calling on the phone, catching up on the 24 hours they'd missed with each other.

She sighs.

Through the doors, she sees Elliot's oldest daughter, Maureen. She's in her late teens and gaining that elegance that age finally brings to girls. Elliot comes through carrying his youngest daughter, his son beside him, and the fourth, Kathleen, following. He's in a white shirt and black slacks, nothing he's ever worn to work, and she gets that. That he wouldn't want to wear fabric to church that had seen what he sees everyday.

He is smiling and mellow and snapping at the kids good-naturedly, and she thinks that he is a good man, despite his faults, and it sends a yearning through her chest and low in her belly that just feels painful. She can't understand how she can want him so much and be so fucking _terrified_ of actually being with him. If she loses him as a partner, she suspects she'll never get over it, but if she's sleeping with him, _dating_ him, and she loses him? The thought creates a lump in her throat, as if she's waiting for the gunshot, for the bullet to hit her instead.

He looks up as they start down the sidewalk, and he sees her. He smiles at first, his grin widening, and then he catches himself, remembers. She watches as his smile fades. But he doesn't glare or look angry. He simply furrows his brow, questioningly, and she nods. Yes, they have a case. Sorry.

He walks the kids down the street to his car, and pops the trunk, grabbing a duffel bag out of it. She watches as he hands Elizabeth to Maureen along with his car keys, and hugs them all before jogging across the street toward her. Behind him, Kathleen waves at her, and she waves back. She meets them all at restaurants sometimes, with Elliot. Kathleen is fascinated by her, and the fact that she does the same job as her dad. It makes her feel good, to be honest, that someone looks up to her.

"Hey," Elliot says as he walks up to her. It's not warm enough to be without a coat, but he's always run hot. "We catch one?"

"Yeah," she says, studying him for signs of anger. "Sorry."

He shrugs and holds her gaze for one beat too long. A reminder of Friday night. He looks away. "S'okay. Let's go."

He changes in the car, hitting his elbows on the dashboard as he tries to yank his good pants off and slide into jeans. She stays silent and tries to watch the traffic.

She wants to ask, "We good?" But no. No, they're not good. Not yet. Maybe not ever now. Maybe they've fucked it up forever this time.

So she thinks, well, it was only a matter of time anyway. Nothing good ever lasts.

[]

The rape is a standard case. As standard as they get, and that always bugs her, that they can have a 'standard' rape case. But the victim is angry and the perpetrator is clear, and they pick him up within three hours of talking to the victim and send him on his way into the court system.

The paperwork is brief, and she glances up at Elliot from time to time as they work across from each other on Monday morning in the eerily empty squad room. He doesn't react to her, but he doesn't seem tense and angry either.

"I'm not mad at you," he finally says, when she glances at him for the fifth time in silence. He looks at her, and she lifts her brows, and he corrects himself. "I mean, I am, sort of. But…" He pauses and swallows, and she sees then that maybe he's more hurt than angry. "I can't make you feel something you don't."

"It's not that, El," she says softly. Monday has been slow, but nearly all the detectives are out, and the clerks are at their desks and there's no one within earshot. "I just…" And then she hesitates, because she doesn't know how to tell him about her fear of losing of him, of losing the job, because they're all she really has. It feels too… revealing, even with him. "Everything is telling me it's a bad idea."

He holds her gaze for a long moment, and in the early morning sun his eyes are a very light blue. "It might be," he finally says quietly. "Or it might be the best thing we ever do."

She keeps looking into his eyes, and her mouth runs dry, and she knows he is asking her to take a risk. To jump in with both feet, the way he always does, and she just wants to slow things down, make sure it's _right_.

He doesn't press though. He looks back down at his reports and asks, "You want some coffee? I'll make a run."

And she stares at him a beat longer, feeling the anxiety fade a bit. He seems so clear on his feelings, and hers are such a tangled mess.

"Okay," she says.

He gives her a faint smile and stands, grabbing his coat, and she can't help but feel like he's trying to placate her and put her at ease again. She watches his back as he heads out of the room, his stride is so familiar to her that she can recognize it at a distance now.

[]


	3. Touch Your Skin

Don't just stand there, come close to me. I've decided you're all I need. Been wanting a reason. This could be a good situation. Maybe tonight, will throw us in. Every time you touch your skin to mine, I can't take it. I know how you want to feel tonight. Let's fly, baby. Don't stop talking, keep moving on. This was always what we were in it for. We've been wanting a reason. This could be a good situation. Maybe tonight, will throw us in. (touch your skin by bob hartry)

Part Three

[]

She doesn't have time to worry about the thing between them after that, because that night they meet Daniel Varney. Or, rather, they meet Daniel Varney's victims. Varney hears God's voice telling him to mete out punishment in His name, and he kills a prostitute and then sets her on fire. It's an extreme that bothers her, even after all these years of seeing the worst of people. It gets her down deep and makes her ache, and she can't get the smell out of her hair.

Then Varney rips open another young woman, only hours later, and they start to feel that skittish panic that always sets in when murders are connected.

Then Varney stabs and slashes three people in an arcade bathroom, killing a young boy and his father. There is blood everywhere, and the bathroom is silent with death and drenched in the coppery smell, and the wife and mother of the man and boy is standing outside talking to police with a vacant expression in her eyes. Olivia has seen it before, and, like the prostitute's death and desecration, this also makes her ache. The family was only here visiting, and she can't imagine losing your child and the man you love in one fell swoop. She thinks that the woman probably couldn't imagine it either, before now, and in a desperate attempt to ward off the crushing pain, she is trying to not absorb the information.

Olivia glances at Elliot as they question her, and his eyes are as bare and affected as her own are. When they are in the bathroom, bending over the bodies, she watches him as his gaze runs over the boy, who looks to be a little older than Dickie, and he looks haunted, sick. He turns away.

This is going to stay with them, she realizes. It's going to be one of those cases. She already feels changed, different. She feels twisted inside, away from her normal self, and she knows she will never be that shade of normal again. The way she was before this case. Each bad case twists her a little more. Twists Elliot a little more. And they have a new 'normal' they must settle into each time. Changed forever.

They are running after that, trying to catch up, and it isn't their case alone anymore. The department mobilizes. They have witnesses and a drawing, and the press is eager, and Cragen slips into the drill sergeant role he knows so well. He keeps Elliot in the precinct to help organize the task force, and she goes with Fin and Munch to run down the leads that come in over the phone.

And it is exhausting. Once again they can only sleep in short shifts, and even then it's difficult, because they all worry that when they wake up again there will be another innocent person who has lost their life violently, and they did nothing to stop it.

They are doing the best they can do, but it never feels like enough.

It isn't until Varney cashes a check with blood on it that they catch a break. And, really, religious insanity always reveals itself, because the killers are usually so far gone, so convinced of their righteousness, that they barely care about hiding their crimes.

They arrest Daniel Varney in the church where he works, and he is not well. That much she can see as she questions him at the precinct. But he won't deny his crimes, and the hunt really has ended, and as the department drains empty again the stress of the past few days settles down on them all.

In the desperate race to find him before he killed again, it was easier to keep the victims out of their minds, but now? Now she looks at Elliot and sees how far away he is. Fin leaves early and Munch is quiet, his theories about Jack the Ripper put to rest.

She keeps imagining Mrs. Weston, her eyes wide and shocked, her mind fighting to keep reality from intruding. Her boy and her husband dead in a city she doesn't even know.

When Michael calls to confirm the date for that night that she'd forgotten about, she finds herself speechless. She can't imagine going, and yet she can't imagine explaining why.

"Is everything okay, Olivia?" he asks over the phone.

"I, uh… yeah," she says, because what is she going to tell him? She barely knows him, she realizes.

"Come out and we'll have some fun, okay? You'll forget all about your bad day." There's a smile in Michael's voice.

She blinks and there are tears in her eyes and she hates that. The case is mostly over now, and she really doesn't need to hang onto it any longer, even though she knows it will linger. Maybe she really just needs to try. Suddenly she doesn't want to be here. She wants to be with people who are untouched by this mess. She wants to be untouched herself. She wants it _so much_.

"Okay," she says, finally. "I'll be there."

[]

She doesn't see Elliot all afternoon. Cragen takes him along to report to the brass on Varney's case, and she does their paperwork alone and then goes up to the crib and runs the water in the bathroom and she stares in the mirror and takes deep breaths.

When she comes out again, he's sitting on the bench in the crib, next to the lockers. He is leaning over his knees, elbows bent, wrists loose, and his head is bent down, and he looks so tired that she almost aches. She knows the boy's death affected him. The destruction of a family always does. His rage is gone for the moment, his target caught, and only the exhaustion and the ache of what they've seen is left. It's always when they stop battling the perp and start battling themselves.

She opens her locker and grabs her bag from inside. He sits very still and says nothing, and she sets her bag aside and sits beside him.

"This one is going to be hard to forget," she says, needlessly.

He nods, and she watches as he rubs his hands together absently, his thumb running over the scars on his knuckles. It had felt odd, being apart so much of the time on this case.

"You did great," she says, quietly. "Coordinating the operation. You could tell Cragen was impressed." She can see the weariness in his eyes.

He runs his hands over his face, tiredly, and then he looks at her and holds her gaze, and she can see that twist in his eyes. That change. That darkness that settles inside of them after a case really affects them. The darkness that has settled inside of her sees it too, and leaps up, trembling in recognition.

"Olivia," he says, in a low rasp. "Come home with me."

It hits her low and deep, and makes the breath stop in her lungs, and she wants to. She wants to go home with him and tangle herself inside of him, with someone who _knows_. She remembers his words about not being able to sleep casually with her, and she even wants that. She wants to just be with him.

"I…" She swallows and glances away from him, and she feels like this is the turning point. "I can't," she finally says. "I have a date with Michael."

His jaw tightens and his eyes harden and he looks away from her to stare at the lockers in front of him, and he says, "Tonight? After this shitty case?"

She doesn't know how to explain her reasoning, so she just says, "Yes."

"You're gonna sit in a restaurant and talk to him about dead kids and burned prostitutes?" His voice is bitter, and she figures he has every right to sound like that.

"I'm not going to talk about it at all," she says. "I'm going to forget all about it for one night." And then she adds, because she thinks maybe it'll help, "I'm not going to sleep with him."

Elliot huffs out a laugh, although not a humorous one, and scrubs at his face again. "Olivia," he sighs. "You're killing me here."

"I owe him," she says.

"You've talked to him for three months on the phone and met him twice," Elliot snaps. "You don't owe him shit."

"I owe him an explanation."

Elliot breathes quietly. "You gonna break up with him?"

"I don't know." Really, her life is a mess.

They're silent for a moment, and then he says, "You told me you didn't know if this thing between us was real or just the job."

"Yeah."

"You still feel that way?"

She isn't sure. Certainly if the job ended tomorrow and they didn't see each other for years, she would still feel a connection with him, an ache, even if she was with someone else. "I think it's complicated," she says, instead.

"It's real," he says. "It's real because the job is real and we _are_ the job, Liv. You can't separate it out. Even a wife and four kids hidden out in Queens couldn't do that for me."

"There needs to be balance," she says, finally, feeling the crux of her problem swinging too close. "Doing the job with you during the day and sleeping with you at night would be… betting everything on one hand."

"I've always been a gambler," he says.

"And the last time you bet big, you lost," she retorts, thinking of his family.

"You're different," he says.

And she still wants to do it. She still wants to go home with him and wrap herself up in him and breathe him in and take that big leap. And the cell phone in her pocket buzzes with a text message, and she knows it's Michael, and that she has to at least _try_ to do this right. To keep both her and Elliot from plunging into something that could ruin them.

"I have to go," she says.

He looks at her. "No," he says. "You don't."

She bristles a little at that. So she says nothing, and she goes.

[]

She knows even as she's putting on her black slip dress that she's making a mistake. The dark weight of the case is sitting heavily on her shoulders, making her feel like she's wading through molasses. She feels distant and cut off from the world and only barely cognizant of what other people are doing and saying. She'd hardly responded to her neighbor in the hallway who'd called out a happy greeting to her.

She can have a few drinks, she thinks, and she'll relax and Michael will talk about work and some of his traveling adventures and she will maybe forget for a little while. She knows from experience that this is not solid reasoning on her part. Nearly three years into this job and she's still figuring out how to deal with it.

The dress is too little, even for spring. It is silky and modest, but the straps are camisole delicate and the fabric is thin. She loves it though, and the one time she wore it into work when she was called in during a date, both Fin and Elliot had whistled at her and then could barely keep their eyes off her. It makes her feel good.

Even the power of the dress seems to fall flat tonight though.

She meets Michael at the restaurant, and he has brought another couple along, and she feels upset at first, because she can barely focus on him tonight so adding another two people seems strenuous. But then they laugh together and talk and she can comfortably smile and nod and let her mind wander, and she thinks that maybe it's better this way.

Michael is good-looking. He's tall and has thick, dark hair and green eyes and a confident bearing that draws her in. He's genuine, or seems so anyway, and before this thing with Elliot went truly FUBAR she'd really enjoyed talking to him on the phone, even if they hadn't been able to get their schedules in synch.

He asks her how work is, and she doesn't know what to say. His friends are fascinated by the fact that she's a detective, and they want to hear about her cases, and she doesn't mention Varney because it's a big, public case. She couldn't say much about it even if she wanted to, but what she really doesn't want to do tonight is tell people who don't get it all about how evil their world really is. And she knows implicitly that bringing up dead children will stop the conversation cold.

So, she tells them that her job is really boring and they shrug and then go on talking about a party they went to last weekend, and about the Giants, and they laugh and joke and drink and she… sinks.

She doesn't hold it against them. They don't know, and that's good. There should be oblivious people in the world. It means she and Elliot are doing their job well.

And she wonders what he's doing now. If he's drinking or sleeping or talking to his ex-wife, or if he's thinking about her. The sharpness of the stab of longing that hits her, takes her by surprise.

_"It's real because the job is real and we _are_ the job..."_

It's a mathematically incorrect statement, but she feels his words implicitly at that moment. And they are true. When A equals C and B equals C, it doesn't mean that A equals B. But then again… maybe sometimes it does. Maybe sometimes it doesn't matter, because it's close enough.

When her phone buzzes in her handbag she smiles apologetically at the others. "Sorry," she says. "It could be work." It's an excuse. It's not work, because it's an incoming text, and Cragen would never text her about a case. But they all nod in understanding and she gets up and walks into the hallway where the restrooms are, and she half expects to see Elliot's name on the text anyway, but she still smiles a bit and shakes her head.

_Having a good time?_

She hits his number in speed dial, and he answers on the first ring.

"Hey," he says, and she can't believe how good it is to hear his voice when she only left him in the crib three hours ago. "Did I interrupt anything?"

"No," she says. "He brought friends. They're talking about a party last weekend."

"Really? Maybe you can jump in with a few stories about rape and murder."

She rolls her eyes. "Don't be a dick, Elliot."

She hears him exhale a laugh. It doesn't seem to matter what is going on between them, hard cases are hard cases and an automatic truce is drawn.

"Hey," she says, quietly, moving to the far corner of the hallway. "How are you? I'm just… I'm sort of worried."

He's quiet for a moment, before he says, "That boy in the arcade. Man. He just reminded me of Dickie so much."

"I know," she says. "Did you call him tonight?"

"Yeah. I didn't say much. He has a friend staying over and they were having fun. I didn't want to freak him out."

She nods and leans against the wall. "Yeah," she says, sympathizing.

"I hate imagining it, you know? Walking in and seeing your kid like that."

"Yeah. Me too."

"How about you?" he asks. "Is it working? Are you forgetting about it?"

She sighs. "No. I keep thinking about Mrs. Weston. That look in her eyes. It was like she was already dead too, she just didn't realize it yet."

"Shit," Elliot swears, softly.

They are comfortably silent for a moment, and she realizes that for the first time since she's left the precinct she feels engaged again. She feels present.

"What are you doing, Olivia?" he asks in a low voice. "You really want to be there?"

She folds against the wall, pressing her forehead to the plaster. "I don't know."

"You really want to go back and pretend to laugh at their jokes? You want to drink until you either break down or pass out?"

She takes a long, deep breath.

He continues, "You want to spend the night pretending and trying to keep it down, or do you want to spend it with someone who knows? Someone you don't have to pretend with?"

There is a curious feeling inside of her. A slow, steep falling sensation. A loosening that just grabs hold of her and makes her feel weary and limp and re-energized at the same time.

Surrender.

"I want to spend it with someone who knows," she says, softly. She wants to climb through the phone and into his arms.

"I can come pick you up right now," he says, voice rough. "Tell me where."

"No," she says. "I'll take a cab, okay?"

"Okay," he agrees. And then, "Right now, Olivia."

"Okay."

She hangs up and goes back to tell Michael the bad news. He takes it with understanding and disappointment, and then he walks her outside to help her get a cab, and she thinks that she really should like this man. She should fall in love with him, but she can't. He could be everything that all the other men were not. He could be, but he isn't, because he can't be the one thing she really needs.

He can't be Elliot.

[]

In the cab she doesn't answer the driver when he tries to start a conversation with her. She stares out the window at the lights and the nightlife and she realizes that she is taking a step here in a direction she never thought she'd go.

She was so sure she'd never be the woman who slept with her partner. When she'd been very young and still in uniform, walking the beat, she'd gone to the bars occasionally with the other cops, sisters and brothers, and they'd told her, "You don't know what it's like. Don't pass judgment until you_ know_."

And she had known, a few years later. The way cases can get bad. The way you can't talk to anyone except maybe your co-workers, maybe just your partner. The way civilian men are either intimidated by you or _way_ too turned on by you. The way boyfriends get jealous when you're spending all day, and sometimes all night, with another man who knows you in a way that they never can.

Karen had always warned her about sleeping with her future partners, but then that makes more sense now that she knows Karen had always been IAB.

Still, she'd managed to avoid it until now.

Until Elliot.

Sometimes she wonders if she's known all along that it would be him. She remembers their first day together with brilliant clarity. The way he'd sat tilted back in his chair, his shoes up on the corner of his desk, staring through Cragen's office windows at her. When she'd met him he was all intense gaze and posturing and a wolfish grin.

And from then she can remember a lot of firsts with him. Their first case. The first time he told her she'd done a good job. The first time she'd seen his violence. Their first bad case. Their first beer together.

The first time she'd told him about her mother.

She sighs and they turn down Elliot's street, and she feels a spark of excitement and relief at the same time. She's not really trying to fool herself that for them it will be different. That they can be partners and be something else and it will all work perfectly. But she can admit that she has no power over this. That she can't walk away and she can't keep him at a distance, and that she really just wants this for right now.

She pays the driver and slides out, and as she walks up his sidewalk, he opens the door and stands there, leaning against the frame, arms folded over his chest, and she slowly climbs the steps and stops before him. He looks at her, his gaze taking in everything, from her eyes to her throat to her shoes and her bare legs. When he holds her gaze again, she can see the unspoken demand in them. Things haven't changed, and she knows this. That she is committing to something by giving in to this.

"What about Michael?" he demands, quietly.

"I'll talk to him tomorrow," she says. "I just wanted to get out of there tonight."

He nods, and then he takes her by the hand, and she lets him pull her inside.

[]

His living room is lit only by the television, the sound turned all the way down. She sees a glass tumbler on his end table, but he shrugs and says, "I had one, but then I had to give it up."

She understands that. It's easy to get lost in drink, but sometimes when the case is bad drinking just makes it worse. It makes you dwell and makes the images more vivid, less controlled, and if you drink a lot in a very short time, before you know how it's going to affect you, you end up feeling worse for the hours it takes your body to metabolize it all.

He starts unbuttoning her coat, and she sighs and stands still and the sadness washes over her. "She was trying so hard to make it not real," she says, quietly.

"They finally got a hold of her brother. He was flying in tonight."

She exhales a breath in relief. That at least Mrs. Weston won't be alone, even if it doesn't change her nightmare. "Her life will never be the same."

He pulls her coat off and tosses it on his sofa, and then he puts his hands on her bare shoulders, his thumbs sliding over the straps of her dress almost thoughtfully. "Can you get the smell out of your mind?" he asks.

"The blood?" she asks. "Or the burnt smell?"

"Either," he rasps. "Both."

She shakes her head, and he pulls her forward, and she slides her arms around his waist and presses her face into his shoulder. She can let go then, at that moment. She goes limp against him, her hands sliding up over the muscles in his back and curling tightly into the fabric of his shirt. He smells clean, like soap and shaving cream and laundry detergent, and she breathes him in and her eyes get wet and she sniffs loudly, betraying herself. But he says nothing about it. He just rocks her a bit and his hand slides onto the back of her neck and his fingers rub warm circles into her skin.

"I've been in this unit for eight years," he says against her hair. "And I _still_ don't understand how someone can stick a knife in a kid."

She has no words to answer him with. She just keeps him tightly in her grasp and breathes slowly until she feels steady again. His hand moves down her bare back and then over the filmy material of her dress, resting against the small of her back. "You want a drink?"

She loosens her hold on him a bit, pulling back far enough to look into his eyes. "No," she says, "I'm just tired."

He looks at her with eyes that reflect that same weariness. "We can just go to sleep if you want."

The exhaustion is deep in her bones, but her mind hasn't shut off yet. What she wants is to feel like she's a living human being. She wants to feel close to him, and she wants to drain all that excess energy out of her nerves. "What do you want?" she asks.

He apparently has no patience left for indecisiveness. "I want to stop thinking about this whole fucking mess," he says, and he brings his mouth close to hers. "I want _you_."

She closes the gap and kisses him, and he exhales hard through his nose and slides his hands down slowly, over the dress, over her hips. His mouth is warm and wet and carries the hint of bourbon, and she slides one hand under his shirt, against the broad expanse of his bare back. He pulls back from her and slides his shirt off silently. When he comes back to her, he slips his fingers under the straps of her dress and presses his mouth to the side of her neck. She rests her hand on his nape, and she shifts, restlessly.

"C'mon," he says. He pulls her by the hand toward his bedroom, and she slips her shoes off, following him barefoot. The old flat he lives in has a small upstairs level with two rooms that belong to his kids when it's his weekend. His bedroom is a small room off the kitchen, the ceiling slanted from where the stairs head up above it.

There's dim light through his only window, and the shadows wave quickly against the wall. It's windy tonight, with the warm, wet air of spring. He peels her dress off and the little she wears underneath as he kisses her slowly. She slides onto the bed and watches him in the darkness as he starts unbuckling his belt. In even that brief absence of his touch her mind starts to bring forth flashes of the crimes. Blood spray and scent and the bewildered face of Jean Weston. She swallows it all back down.

Elliot looks at her in shadowed concentration as he slides his jeans off and then his boxer briefs, and he is already rigid. He crawls up onto the bed with her and his mouth goes right to her throat. She curls her fingers into the shaved short strands of his hair and she shifts underneath him as he slides between her legs.

"Okay?" he asks, because he always does, and because things can change.

"Yeah," she says, and her own voice sounds breathless and drawn out.

His hand cups her breast, and then his mouth covers her nipple, and he draws on it, soft at first and then hard, and the subtle pain of it makes her suck her breath in and arch up. It's exactly what she needs though. That sharp reminder that she is breathing and feeling. It knocks the images of Jean Weston's son right out of her mind. He blows then, across her wet nipple, and her skin tightens and feels ripply and she makes a noise deep in her throat. He moves lower, teeth scraping across her stomach and then sinking into the skin over her hipbone, jolting her. Even with these little moments of hardness, he is soothing. This is different. This is comfort and consummation, not desperation.

She is breathing hard, focused on his mouth and the way he is leaving a hot, wet trail over her skin that is cooling in the night air. He's moving slowly, like he has time, and she supposes he does, and it's a strange contradiction with how heavy he is. How intense. Even as good as it feels, there are still flashes in her mind, images she doesn't want to see, and each time it happens she cools a bit. He falters now and then, his mouth pausing and resting against her skin, and she knows the same thing is happening to him.

She is so, so tired, and yet she can't stay passive. The pleasure of his mouth isn't enough to quiet her mind. When he sucks a mark into her thigh, she shifts and grabs at his head, trying to pull him back up to her. He lets her lead him, and he lies flush along her body, pressing his mouth to hers. "What do you want?" he asks against her lips, in a voice that says he'll give her anything.

In answer, she pushes him over and drags her mouth over his neck. He lies tensely, the way he did before, and being passive is something he doesn't do well. He tries though, and she hears the saliva click in his throat as she works her way down his chest, sucking hard at his skin and then soothing it with her tongue. His hand tangles in her hair, and his breath sounds loud in the small room, and she slides her hand down to his hip, her fingers finding the ridge of bone there, then the soft rasp of hair on his thigh. She touches his tattoo there again, but this time she doesn't have to stop. She pushes her palm down over the arched heat of his cock, and he exhales slow and hard, his fingers tightening in her hair.

His reaction is arousing, and it drives everything out of her head. She slips between his legs and curls her fingers around his hard length, and he shifts beneath her, losing his grip on her hair. She rubs her thumb over his tip and huffs warm breath over him, hesitating. He stills almost suddenly, and meets her gaze in the dark and says, "God, Liv... Do it." In an almost pained voice.

She touches her tongue to him first, and then slides him into her mouth, and he makes a wordless sound and the muscles in his thighs tighten under her arms. It's now that she can feel how thick he really is, and remembering what he feels like inside of her sends a spark along her spine. She plays a bit, trying to find what he likes, and when she starts low and sucks slow and hard up to the tip, he fists his hands into the sheets and flexes under her.

"Olivia," he whispers. "Fuck." And no matter how many times he says it that way, it still sends a sharp stab of pleasure through her body and sends heat pooling between her legs. His endurance is iron though, and he is as affected as she is by their exhaustion and the case, and as far as she drives him over the next few minutes, until he's almost panting and his jaw is clenched, he doesn't come. She aches for him.

He doesn't tell her to stop, but he curls his fingers around her wrist and pulls, and she slides up his body. She straddles his hips, and he curls his fingers into her thighs, directing her, watching her from under lowered lashes. She guides him, and he's very hard. She's so wet that he slides in easily, and it isn't until she's sitting on his hips with his cock buried to the hilt that she feels that familiar ache that hints at his size. She takes a slow breath.

He pushes his hips up into her, and she starts moving, slowly at first. His eyelids flicker and slip closed before he opens them and stares up at her. She can feel the exhaustion in both of them as she rocks against him. The more they work out and let the case go, the more it creeps up and grabs hold of them. She feels wound up and drained at the same time, and she moves faster. It's a slow intense wave that keeps circling inside of her and can't quite break. She wants it then, wants to just let it take her and feel the relief in her muscles and her mind, but maybe the case was too much. Maybe she's over-tired. It feels good and bad at the same time. Elliot is panting beneath her, and his hands are steel bands around her thighs, and even in his own pleasure he sees her struggling.

He pulls her down, low, until she's almost lying over him, and he winds his hands in her hair and kisses her, lazily. "Stop thinking about it," he orders into her mouth. "Look at me."

She does. She looks at him, and she moves, and he grabs her hips and pulls her down, until he's buried deep. And then he slides his fingers between her legs and finds her clit. It jolts her almost instantly, and she moves against him, shallowly, until she can feel the orgasm coming and she tightens up and she finally comes, her whole body tight and then shuddering as the wave crashes down and takes her out of it and she has to press her forehead against his shoulder, helplessly. She doesn't say his name until the intensity wanes and her muscles ache in relief as she moves slowly with the aftershocks.

It leaves her sated, but feeling raw. Exposed. With Elliot almost uncomfortably hard and big inside of her.

"Don't stop," he says then, his voice something between a groan and growl. His hands urge her hips to move, and she does, only half aware of what she's doing and relying on instinct. He groans then, when she finds the right angle and speed. He pants. "Fu--"

It all turns into one long groan then, and he thrusts up beneath her and pulls her down with his hands, and she watches as he bares his teeth and comes, his jaw tight and his breath stopping in his throat for one long moment before rushing out of him.

When his hands loosen around her hips, she slips off of him and lies beside him, the cool of the sheets a comfortable change from his hot, sweat-misted skin. His chest is still heaving, and she runs absent fingers over his biceps.

She feels more than languid. So drained and weary that moving is painful. And yet her eyes won't close. "I hate it," she says softly into the darkness as his breathing slows. "When I get so tired I can't sleep."

He exhales slowly. "Me too" he says. "Nothing works. I can work out until I'm too tired to move, and I still won't sleep."

She makes a wordless sound of agreement, and she can feel the moments passing then, distinct and heavy and quick.

Just not quickly enough.

[]

I always thought I'd never be the woman who slept with her partner," she says later, when they are comfortable and clean and very tired but very awake and lying together in his bed.

"It isn't the worst thing that can happen."

"Maybe not. It's just... I can't imagine doing anything else, El. I don't want to lose this job."

"I wouldn't let that happen," he says, vehemently.

"How would you stop it from happening?"

He is silent for a moment, and then exhales. "I don't know. Whatever I had to."

She doesn't know what to say to that. "You always risk too much," she finally says, quietly. "For me, and for this job. You don't have to do that."

"I do," he insists. "There are way too many men out there like Daniel Varney. I can't stand to let them keep walking the streets."

"I know... We can only do what we can do."

"You should talk," he accuses. "Half the time I have to wake you up in the crib in the mornings after you work all night."

She smiles faintly. "I don't have kids who depend on me."

He gets quiet then, thinking, and she feels just a hint of that energy he emits. That violence that lies low under his skin, waiting.

"Sometimes it feels like nothing we do makes any difference at all," he rasps.

She slides her palm across his bare stomach and rests her lips against his shoulder. "We make a difference, El. It might only be one victim at a time, but we do."

"We don't stop it," he says, darkly. "We take one asshole down and ten more take his place."

"We get as many as we can."

"It never feels like enough. Even when we have them dead to right, half the time the court lets them walk away anyway."

It's frustrating. He's right, but she is worried by the dark tone to his voice, the hopelessness it conveys. "Hey... You okay?"

He isn't, of course. And neither is she. But there is 'normal people' okay and then there is their sort of okay, and he is stretching the limits of even their sort of okay lately, and she isn't sure how to help him.

"Don't get up tomorrow and walk away from me, Olivia," he says, roughly.

"I'm not going to," she says. She doesn't even think she's capable of that. They are spiraling down now and it's much too late to pull the cord.

He turns toward her and slides an arm around her waist, tugging her close. His warmth is lulling. "I knew it was going to be you the day we met," he says, quietly, almost sleepily.

She doesn't have to ask what he means. She thinks that if there was ever a time in her life when she might start believing in God, it is now. When it seems as if three and a half decades of her life--of struggling and hurting and getting up off the floor again and again--have always been leading to this. This job, and this man, have always seemed to be her destination.

He falls asleep with his arm around her, and his breath stirring her hair, and she listens to the rhythmic and steady sound of his slumber for a while, before finally slipping into that tenuous place in between. She can't sleep and she can't not. She will be unrested tomorrow, but she is too tired to move right now.

[]

Elliot's alarm goes off early the next morning. She jolts awake to the unfamiliar noise, and he leans over her to switch it off then collapses next to her again. She still feels exhausted, and the morning light is darker than usual. In the silence she can hear rain tapping on the window and the back porch. All she wants to do is curl up and go back to sleep.

Elliot shifts beside her and his arm curls around her waist. "Varney's arraignment is this morning," he reminds her, his voice low and gravelly from sleep.

She takes a deep, resigned breath. "Shit," she sighs.

"I'll drop you off at your place and go get a squad and pick you up again."

She nods, wordlessly, and sighs again, listening to the rain. They wouldn't have time to rest yet. He hesitates, as if he wants to say something, and then she feels his hand in her hair briefly and he's up and into the shower. She finally drags herself up and dresses, and sits on the bed to slip her shoes on, watching as he stands in his bathroom shaving. She's seen him shave a million times, in the crib and here at his house when she's had to pick him up. But there is an intimate, sexual edge to watching him now as she sits on the bed where they just spent the night together and he leans across the sink, shirtless, his black slacks unfastened and sinking low on his hips.

She likes the image. And the feeling of it. The way he's calm in the morning and the way the bedroom feels warm and comfortable with the scent of the soap from his shower and the rain pounding outside. It is the same and it is different than their partnership as detectives, and she wonders exactly how blurry those lines have gotten. She can't quite shake the feeling though that she is somehow tempting fate. That she is trying to have too much and soon it will all be taken away from her.

[]

The arraignment takes most of the morning, and then Varney is taken away to be held for trial. For a moment, at lunch, she thinks the day will be blessedly slow, and they can finish paperwork and she can go home and sleep. Instead, they catch a sexual assault across town and spend the afternoon chasing down the victim's ex-husband before he takes off on a flight to Vancouver.

In the early evening stillness of the squad room, Cragen gives them the news: Varney has untreated syphilis, and has had it for quite a while. His brain is decimated and while it's up to the attorneys to battle it out, he's clearly not responsible for his actions.

She and Elliot look at each other over their desks, and he shakes his head slowly and stares at the floor. When he gets up suddenly a few minutes later, he kicks his chair and it spins away into the filing cabinets while he stalks away to the men's room. She watches him go and sighs.

It's a no-win situation, with collateral damage all around. Sometimes it's easier when the perpetrator is clearly evil. There is a clear sense of right and wrong, of good people and bad people, and Elliot has always liked his shades of gray divided into black and white. The senselessness of these murders is now twofold, and there is no real target for his anger. She considers going after him, but then Cragen heads that way, and she is painfully aware of how careful the two of them have to be now.

Elliot comes back again, and he sits and they work, silently, for another hour, until Cragen tells them to go home as he's walking out in his coat. When he's gone, they look at each other, and Elliot holds her gaze for several long beats. They don't have to talk. She gets up and he follows. In the elevator, they both lean on the railing and his arm rests against hers. He drives them both, and the quietness in the car is a relief after the day they've had.

They walk up to her apartment and she leaves him to close the door while she walks right into the bathroom to clean the day off of herself.

When she comes out, still in a towel, her apartment is dark and he is standing in her bedroom looking down on the street through her window, his coat still on.

"Are you leaving?" she asks.

He glances at her, his eyes lingering on the towel and on her bare skin. He shakes his head but doesn't talk, and she can see the melancholy in his eyes, the weariness in his posture. It's her turn, she realizes, to make him stop thinking. So she does. She goes over and pushes the coat from his shoulders, and then his suit jacket. She slowly unknots his tie and unbuttons his shirt, and he stands quietly and watches her in the darkness. He smells like the soap he used at the precinct before they started their paperwork, and it's one of those scents that always hits her at the strangest times.

He slips his shoes off, and then his slacks, and she is on the verge of telling him that they will just go to sleep, that it's been a long few days and they are bone tired and they just need to rest, but he strips off the rest of the way and then puts his arms around her and kisses her. So she kisses him back and drops her towel, and then she pulls him onto the bed, and it is very unhurried. He moves his mouth on hers with a laziness that makes her languid, and he slides his fingers between her legs and strokes slowly until she's aching.

When he finally moves between her legs and pushes inside of her, he is the slowest he's ever been. The most calm and controlled and, in a way, the most exhausted. He thrusts slowly and presses deep and he slides against her so she can feel every inch of his bare body, and it takes a long, long time. His exhalations are hard and hot against her neck, and he trembles from time to time, and for one startling moment she wants to tell him she loves him. It's there, right on the tip of her tongue, her entire body aching with it, and she feels a little dazed and unnerved and warm and wanting. He groans then, quietly, against her neck, and he slides up inside of her as far as he can, and it takes her breath away. When he comes, his breath hitches and then bursts out of him, and he holds himself still and deep inside of her until he's done.

She hasn't come, but she strokes his back and rests with him, and when he slides off of her, he lies close and slides his hand between her legs again. It doesn't take long. Not with everything that came before. His fingers are slick from her and from himself, and the direct contact is intense. She comes quickly and hard, and she tries to swallow her moans but they tinge her breaths and vibrate on his skin when she turns her head into his neck, not wanting to disturb the silence they've created. He lies quietly with her until her breathing slows and her sweat cools.

She goes to the bathroom to clean up again, and when she comes back he is a still shape in the darkness, his breathing rhythmic and light. She crawls under the sheets beside him, and he moves, only half awake, to accommodate her, his hand sliding heavily and absently over her bare back as he turns to face her. He falls asleep almost immediately, and she listens to him as she tries to quiet her realization. It was a bad day. It was a bad week. How can she even sure of what she really feels? There will be more to do with this case. They will have to help Alex and George, and they will have to run down information and someone will have to pay. But for now the crimes have stopped and will not start again, and with the relief of that comes the desire to sleep.

So she does.

[]


	4. Cover Me

Cover me, when I walk alone. Cover me, when my stance it stumbles home. Cover me, we'll trip on through the sands of time. And cover me,'cause I've been branded. I've lost my mind. Lost my mind. But you'll cover me, yeah. Won't you give me shelter from the storm? Over me, you fade into the night.Over me, you melt into the light. Over me, you will fear the things I need. Over me, you will feel the hate I breed. You're under me, and you will question my authority. You're under me, and you will lose almost everything. You're under me, you will feel the pain I wanna bring you. You've got to cover me, cause I've been branded a broken man. Broken man. But you'll cover me, yes. Won't you give me, give me shelter from the storm. (cover me by candlebox)

 

Part Four

[]

With summer, there comes an odd cadence to their work. Maybe it's the way the days get long and their schedule continuously tilts off road. People stay out later in summer, and on weekends they are almost always woken up at 3 or 4 a.m. to work a case. Maybe it's the heat.

Maybe it's simply that she's sleeping with Elliot, in secret. That more often than not she wakes up to those calls from Cragen with her partner naked beside her, either at her place or his, it doesn't matter. Michael is long gone. When she'd told him she wanted to stop seeing him, he'd been more understanding than she thought she'd deserved, but maybe that was because they'd dragged it out so long. It had never been that serious to begin with. It hadn't ever had the chance to gain steam that way. He just tells her to call him someday if she changes her mind, and then he's gone, and it's both a relief and a strange regret.

It is isolating in a way, working with Elliot all day, seeing the shit they see, and then going home at night and being together again. He has his weekends with his kids, and she tries to keep some distance during the week, but in the end they seem to always end up together. She realizes in a way that they are codependent to an extreme, and things might end badly if they don't watch it, but it's hard to worry too much when it's working. She likes having him there at night. She likes having someone she can talk to without sugarcoating the bad shit. She likes doing mundane things with him, like lying around on a Saturday and watching the Mets. She really likes the sex.

And his temper gets better, for a while.

And then Roger Jordan enters their lives, or, as it always happens, his work precedes their meeting. He abducts Justine Foster, 12, right out of her parents' house one Sunday morning before dawn. When they show up, still smelling like each other, Fin is waiting for them. He gives them a look she can't quite classify. She has no idea if he and Munch have figured out that she and Elliot are sleeping together, but she's pretty sure that even if they have, Fin would consider it none of his business.

"Guy came right through the front door," Fin says as she and Elliot walk up on him. "Like he had a key."

"Maybe he did," she says. Always suspect those closest first.

Fin shrugs.

"Search party?" Elliot asks, glancing around.

"Just getting started," Fin says. "Munch is headed back to get it going."

Olivia frowns. "How do they know she was forced from the house?"

"Kid sister saw the guy. She woke the parents up, but they thought she was having a bad dream. They told her to go back to bed. When they got up this morning and realized the older kid was gone, they called police."

Olivia sighs and exchanges glances with Elliot. So the guy had a good head start.

"There's more," Fin says, and they look expectantly at him.

"She has severe asthma. The guy took her inhaler with them, but her parents say it was half empty."

Olivia feels her spirits sink.

Fin and Elliot go in to talk to the parents, and she walks around the side of the house and finds O'Halloran working in a bush.

He glances up when she looks over his shoulder and points to the siding of the house under the window where he's cut away the hedge. "I found this on my walk-around," he says. There's a long, vertical, narrow patch on the siding where the white paint is so faded and burned away that the wood is showing through.

"The hell?" she mutters as she hunkers down next to it.

"I think she had a secret admirer," he says, dryly. He points to the softball-sized rocks pushed up against the foundation of the house. Then he stands and steps up on them. It raises his face to window level.

"Shit," Olivia says. It puts his crotch right in line with the top of the marks on the siding. "She had a peeper."

"Looks like someone cleaned it off too," O'Halloran says. "It smells like bleach. And that'll take care of the paint."

"The parents know?" she asks.

O'Halloran shakes his head. "I doubt we'll get DNA," he says. "But I'll see what I can do."

She nods and leaves him to it. He's a good tech, and she trusts him.

The parents definitely do not know, and she and Elliot spend another hour calming the father down before they can get anything useful out of them. Elliot questions the kid sister and it isn't much, but he figures out that the abductor had a tattoo of a teardrop next to his left eye, and they all look at each other in interest. Teardrop tattoos are a common prison theme. Munch runs it through the parolee records, and they come up with a short list of only three names that have sexual offenses in their histories. Out of those three, two have solid alibis.

Roger Jordan is eerily missing, and has only been paroled for four months. Huang theorizes that he won't kill Justine, at least not right away. If he's been watching her this long and took the time to take her inhaler, then he's looking for a long-term situation. She was carefully chosen. It's both chilling and hopeful.

The task force runs with it, and then there is more bad news. Roger Jordan's brother, David, is a councilman for the city. They go to question him, and there is something off. He reacts with practiced disbelief and then overly eager cooperation. That's something they've come to expect in politicians, but there is no outrage. Not toward them for daring to accuse his brother, and not toward the brother who committed the crime. It is only when the councilman catches Elliot sliding her a look that he seems to realize his mistake. He blusters a bit, and can't seem to decide which side he's on, or should be on, and it's just off. She feels it, and Elliot really feels it, and when they get back to the squad room they go right to Cragen, because there's no way this isn't going to get messy.

He warns them to be damned sure about everything before they do anything.

"He's tied our fucking hands," Elliot growls at her as they walk past the swamped squad room and back into the hallway.

"What do you want to do?" she asks, resignedly. They're just going to have to go with it.

There isn't much they can do except wait for a lead and start doing their research. They start canvassing pharmacies.

Nothing breaks over the next week though, and as the second week starts off, Cragen has to reduce the task force. They still have rape cases coming in. They still have molested children. Justine Foster stays on their plate, but her window of opportunity is quickly closing. Then they do a little research and find out Justine was part of an outreach organization that the councilman sponsored. Sick kids who help educate the community on various chronic illnesses. They look at each other, and they know.

"We need to go back to the councilman," Elliot says to her.

She is wary. "We don't really have anything on him, El."

"We'll just talk to him. See what he says when we bring this outreach team up."

She knows it'll be more than that. It'll be Elliot circling and laying a lot of traps, and it'll be her with one eye on him and one on the councilman seeing how he reacts. It's all they have, but the stakes are higher when it's political. It's just a fact of life. "You wanna tell Cragen?"

He holds her gaze for a moment and then sniffs. "Nah. We'll just drop by around lunchtime. Nothing big."

She lifts an eyebrow at him, but they both know she's in.

[]

The thing with politicians is, when they're evil to begin with they truly believe they're never going to be caught. They really think they're that smart. And they're not afraid to use their power.

The second conversation does nothing to quiet their red flags. Councilman Jordan is so fake she feels that if she touched him, her fingers would sink in through layers of foam and rubber and wet plaster. Elliot's veiled threats do nothing, and his unveiled threats only piss the guy off, but sometimes that spurs action.

He calls Cragen to complain, and Cragen hollers at them and warns them to stay the fuck away from the councilman until they have solid proof, and that is pretty much that. They sit out in front of David Jordan's townhouse a few nights right afterwards, trying to catch… something. But nothing happens.

"There's something going on," Elliot says, angrily, glancing at her in the darkness. "Fuck, Liv, I know it."

She doesn't disagree, but they've got to figure something else out, because this isn't working. When his hands tighten around the steering wheel so hard the plastic creaks, she puts her hand on his tense forearm. "Easy," she says, feeling such déjà vu that it hurts a bit.

He breathes and he swallows and he relaxes a bit back into his seat and he says, "I can't take this shit anymore. I'm going to crack."

He's just venting, but she's not so sure he isn't right.

[]

Another week sees the volunteers all dropping off one by one. The searches stop and the press releases stop, and the department has to focus on the more pressing cases, even if they officially promise to keep looking. Justine Foster isn't the first kid to just disappear and be forgotten by the city, she won't be the last.

But Olivia doesn't forget, and Elliot doesn't forget, and they have to work their new cases, but Justine's ghost doesn't fade. Roger Jordan is out of their reach, but David Jordan is still right there, and more than once she wakes in the night to find Elliot gone from her bed. When he can't sleep he gets up and drives. Around the city looking for Roger Jordan. Past David Jordan's house. On garbage pick-up days, he goes through David's trash, and sometimes she joins him, because it's really all they have, although she knows if Cragen finds out he'll have a fit.

The job means everything to her, to both of them, but it's the victims that matter, and kids are the worst. If the job stops them from saving one kid, then the job isn't working.

And Elliot does crack eventually.

In the early coolness of fall they catch a lull in cases. With an afternoon off, they hit a dumpster behind David Jordan's office, and within 15 minutes Cragen shows up.

"How long?" he demands, and Elliot ignores him, tossing bottles and cans aside to dig at bags with paper trash. Asthma medicine comes with a trail, and they just need to find it amongst the thousands of children that need the same thing.

"We've never given up," Olivia tells him, when Elliot remains silent. Cragen gives her a look that says he'd expected her to know better. "This guy is the key, Captain," she says, and she believes it, even if it's Elliot's zeal that is driving this.

"Well, he might be, but you've just run us out of chances. The Chief of D's called and ordered me—and you—to back off."

"And that doesn't seem suspicious to you?" Elliot demands, finally.

Cragen is annoyed. "It doesn't matter what it seems like to me, you two have been on this guy for a month now, and you've got nothing. You either back off until you get something solid, or you turn over your badges."

"That's bullshit!" Elliot snaps.

Olivia steps in front of him. "We're trying to get something solid. This girl could still be alive, Captain. Huang said he thought Jordan wanted her long term."

"I'm done arguing with you," Cragen says, and there is no room for debate in his voice. "You're done. Right now."

"Garbage is public property," Elliot tries. "We're on our lunch hour."

"Not when it's on private property," Cragen retorts. "And if you've ruined this case for us, Elliot, I will hand your ass over to the IAB myself!"

"So we're just supposed to roll over?" Elliot demands, unable to let it go.

"It's called being professional, Detective." Cragen's voice is hard and his eyes are flint.

Elliot swears and throws the can he's holding against the wall. It bounces off with a hard sound, and Olivia walks toward him, glancing back at Cragen. "You've got to see how ridiculous this is, Captain."

Elliot is holding a glass bottle in his other hand, and the last things she wants is for him to throw that and have it shatter into jagged shrapnel, so she takes it calmly from his hand and tosses it back into the dumpster. He turns hard eyes on her, but he doesn't resist or react to her.

"This is bullshit," he growls.

She agrees, but this is the way things go sometimes. And he knows that.

"You know," Cragen starts, and she can hear by the tone of his voice that he is done with this. "I've had more than enough of your temper this week, Elliot. As of right now, you have the rest of the day off. I suggest you use it to learn how to be a cop again, and not a raging lunatic!"

Elliot's jaw goes wire taut, and she can see the anger burning behind his eyes, and she reaches behind him where Cragen can't see and she grabs a handful of his jacket, trying to warn him to stay silent.

"And you!" The captain points at her, and she holds eye contact with him warily, knowing damn well that she's going to be put in charge of the leash once again. He motions toward Elliot dismissively. "Get him out of here!" His gaze shifts to Elliot. "Come in tomorrow morning ready to work, or turn in your badge. It's your choice."

Elliot is so angry, she can feel the tenseness in his body from inches away, and she can hear him breathing, hard and deep. He actually starts forward, like he's going right for Don, and she grabs him around the waist and shoves him backwards. "Are you fucking crazy?" she demands in a hoarse whisper.

He glances at her, expression still sullen, but he swallows and she can see he's surrendering. She pushes him back again, and he goes. They walk through the back end of the alley, away from the crime scene and back to the car. He silently hands her the keys, and she drives them back toward Manhattan.

"This is bullshit," he says again as they drive. "You know it is, Liv."

"I know, but it isn't going to do anyone any good if you get yourself suspended," she growls. "Or fired."

"I don't even fucking care!" he says, and he punches the dashboard, leaving a small, thin crack behind in the plastic.

She rolls her eyes. "Really?" she demands, glancing at the dashboard. "Really, with the dashboard?"

He ignores her and pretends to be interested in the storefronts going by to the side of them.

"Can you act a little more like a child having a tantrum, please?" she demands sarcastically.

"Probably," he mutters.

He's glaring through the windshield, and she looks at him and wants to stop the car and shake him. "The first month I was with you," she says, angrily. "You told me there were two rules I had to learn to work in SVU. One was to never let it get personal. And the second was that sometimes we're going to lose."

He doesn't say anything, and he doesn't look at her. He rubs at the bridge of his nose and stares forward at the traffic ahead of them.

"And ever since then," she continues, stopping for a red light and feeling even more irritated. "You've repeatedly broken _both_ of those damn rules!"

He finally glances at her, and she glares at him, and he shifts in his seat and says, "I get so tired of it, Olivia!"

She stares at him. "You think I don't?"

He rubs his thumb over the crack he put in the dashboard and doesn't answer her. A horn honks behind her, telling her the light has changed, and she drives on, silently for a while. She knows how he feels. She really does. But goddamn it… She just doesn't know how to get through to him.

"You want me to do this job by myself?" she asks, calmer and quieter. And she isn't sure what makes her ask, except she feels like it's the quickest way through his defenses and his anger. In a sense, it always comes back to their partnership, and what it is and isn't.

He pauses for a long time, but she can feel his agitation. "No," he says, finally and vehemently, and his voice is very, very low.

She sighs, but she lets it drop. Point given and, she assumes, point taken. Small steps.

"You want me to drop you off at your place?" she asks.

"No," he says. "I'll drive myself crazy."

_Too late_, she thinks, but she doesn't say. In a better mood he'd have laughed, but she doesn't want to risk it now.

He glances at her, and then says, in a low rasp, "Take me to your place, Liv."

And she can hear it there in his voice, the sex. And it makes her stomach do a slow flip and her heart speed up, but she swallows down her anticipation and says, "I don't think that's a good idea."

"I do," he says. "I think it's a fucking _great_ idea."

She swallows. And then his hand lands on the back of her neck, very gently, and he runs a thumb through the short hairs there at the base of her skull. "Take me home, Olivia."

_Fuck_, she thinks. Sighs really. _In for a penny, in for a pound._

And she turns toward her apartment.

[]

He's on her as soon as the door closes behind them, his mouth hot and wet and very, very strong. She puts a hand on his throat to keep him from swallowing her. He's angry, and she can feel it vibrating through him. She's frustrated too, although her focus switched to him once he started losing it, and maybe she's a little frustrated with him as well. When he pushes, she pushes back, and she has to use physical strength to handle him. It makes her muscles burn.

He has her against the wall and his hands are wrapped almost painfully around her wrists, and he is pressing against her like he wants to fuck her through her clothes. Right into the wall.

And he probably does.

She separates her mouth from his and grabs the hair at the back of his neck and says, breathlessly, "Calm down, Elliot."

He exhales, hard, against her mouth and he leans into her even further and he says, "You want me to calm down? Cuff me."

She lifts her eyebrow at that, smirking. "You really are kinky," she says, trying to lighten the mood with a joke.

He doesn't laugh. He kisses her again, his tongue sliding against hers and driving deep, and her head presses painfully back into the wall.

"El…" she protests, quietly, when he lets her breathe again.

He lets her wrists go then, and he takes his gun off, and she hears the heavy 'thunk' it makes as he sets it down, in the holster, on her end table. And then he reaches for his belt and she hears the clank of the cuffs and then he's holding them up by one silver ring. "I mean it, Olivia. I can't do this. If you want me to calm down, cuff me."

It isn't that bizarre, really, cops using their own cuffs. It's not like she hasn't done it before. It's not like Elliot didn't fucking bind her with his own fucking tie one night. Stress relief, she thinks, and that actually makes her relax a little bit.

And then he quietly says, "I don't want to hurt you."

And she feels a sharp pain down low at the agony in his voice. _Too late_, she thinks, and she wonders why she's always thinking that around him. Why he's always breaking her heart, one way or another. Making her angry or making her crave or making her want to hold him and tell him everything is going to be okay.

She takes the cuffs from him, and her emotions settle. Neither of them is submissive in nature. They are, in fact, pretty competitive. And having the other under their thumb, even for a short time, can be… heady. She'd seen it in his eyes when he'd had her bound in her bed. She feels it at the mere thought of binding him. And it is something very, very private.

She studies him for a moment, and he stands very still, chest moving with his breath, the rage still roiling inside of him. They never bothered to turn on a light when they came in, and the early evening through her living room windows is dim. "Take off your jacket," she says, softly.

He meets her gaze for a moment, and she looks for something… Anything that might explain what he is looking for, but she only sees him. He eases his jacket off and tosses it onto a chair. He's still in a blue dress shirt and tie, and she decides she likes that look. She reaches down and curls her fingers around his. He swallows audibly. She pulls his hand up and slips one of the cuffs around his wrist, locking it loose enough to stay comfortable. He shifts his stance, and he's breathing so hard it's all she can hear in the silence of her living room.

"Okay?" she asks. She watches his eyes.

He meets her gaze intensely, his jaw tight. "Yeah," he says.

She thinks about cuffing his hands behind him, but then reconsiders. Instead she grabs his other wrist and cuffs his hands in front of him. And then she moves him several steps down the wall and pushes his cuffed hands above his head. He furrows his brows as she leans in against him, but she directs his elbows until the cuff chain slips over the curved metal of a hook imbedded in her wall. He looks up at it and then back at her.

"The guy who lived here before me rode a bicycle," she explains. And then she frowns and mutters, "Well, at least I _think_ that's why he put the hook in…"

Elliot flexes his arms and pulls slowly at the hook, testing it. It's made of thick, formed steel mounted on a plate and set into the stud of the wall with four big bolts. It's not going anywhere. When he realizes this, he looks at her and stills, pressing his back against the wall. It isn't high enough to keep him on his toes, but it keeps his arms lazily elevated, elbows bent above his head, and makes him stand straight.

She feels a sudden wave of heat. Despite the way his temper and his aggression can wear at her, she has to admit that she sees him as the epitome of masculine strength. His weaknesses only attract her more. And locking that part of him up, that strength, is… intriguing in a way that surprises her.

She stands close to him and starts working the knot on his tie. His breath is huffing out against her temple and she can hear him swallowing. He is a mess of tangled emotions that he cannot handle, and even without touching him she can feel that energy in him, the way he almost hums, like a live wire.

"You ever done this before?" she asks, because she's curious. He's thought about it, obviously, and he's tied her, but she wants to know if this is something he's done. Something he and Kathy did when they were still married. She wants to know if it's A Thing.

"Never," he answers, voice rasping, and when she glances at his face, his jaw is tight. And that's something. She never would have thought of him as wanting to be in the cuffs. He's so blatantly alpha-male that he's almost a stereotype. But as he leans against the cuffs and his shoulders bunch under his shirt and he grits his teeth, she suddenly sees. That he's looking for some control—any control—that he can find. She can see the appeal. When he tied her, he wanted her trust. He rarely does things half-assed. He's either standoffish or he's jumping in with both feet, and she is his pivot point and his partner, and she might as well be his wife some days. Maybe it would have been different if he'd still been married when they'd met, but he wasn't. He was drifting and a little lost, and she's not particularly _found_ either, but together they anchor each other.

He needs her, maybe more than she needs him, and she uses that against him in a way. In the car, when she had asked him if he wanted her to do the job alone, she had known, of course, that he didn't. She had wanted him to think about consequences, but the emotional blackmail was unconscious.

Her fingers free the tie, and she pulls it slowly from his neck, the fabric still warm from his heat, and she folds it carefully and puts it on the table next to his gun. The last time she used her cuffs for sex had been before she'd transferred into sex crimes, and it hadn't been like this. It hadn't been serious and so heavy with potential. It hadn't been with someone like Elliot. Although she's not sure how anything with Elliot could be like anything else in her life. She's had other partners, and she's had plenty of lovers, and she's even slept with cops who weren't her partners, but Elliot is all of those things and the two of them are so very similar and so very different and everything between them is so heavy.

She steps close again and starts unbuttoning his dress shirt, leaning in to press her lips to his neck. She can feel his chest heaving under her hands. "Not even with Kathy?" she asks, and she just doesn't know if it's insecurity that makes her ask, or just a desire to figure out what she's doing here.

"No," he says, and his voice is so low and so full of sex that she feels it sharply between her legs. "She wouldn't have…" he starts, and then, "You're the only one who…" He keeps starting and stopping and he can't seem to put his thoughts into words, but she thinks she gets the gist of it, and it only intensifies that warmth inside of her. He wanted her trust and he wants her dedication and her loyalty, and maybe she needs to feel like she matters to him. To anyone. Like she is the only one who can hit certain spots inside of him. Oh, they are a pair, aren't they?

She kisses his neck gently, opening her mouth to taste his skin. He's a little salty after such a long day, and he makes a soft sound, tilting his head away from her so she has easier access. His shirt comes completely undone in her hands, and with his arms raised over his head the two sides fall away from his bare chest and stomach. She pushes her mouth up underneath his chin and kisses his throat, and then she runs her hands down over his chest and up under his arms, and he moves beneath her, his breathing faster, heavier.

His body is hard under her hands. He is tense and eager and restless, and he pulls at the cuffs and flexes, and she isn't sure if he wants to fuck or fight. His wrists are already ringed in red, and she frowns a bit. "You're hurting yourself," she says, trying to admonish him.

He ignores her, suddenly coming up off the wall and dipping his head, pressing his mouth to hers. She grabs him around the waist to keep him from pushing her backwards, and he kisses her aggressively. Fast and hard. She lets him for a few moments, and then she puts her hands on his chest and pushes him back against the wall. He glares at her, looking dangerous and turned on and annoyed. "You're driving me crazy, Olivia," he says, but he doesn't lift his hands and release the cuffs from the hook like she knows he could.

She does see now, what she wants to do.

She starts unbuckling his belt, taking her time. She knows he's not wearing anything under the black dress pants today. He usually doesn't. He doesn't even wear an undershirt, unless he's wearing white, and there's something incredibly sexual about that. The way he puts those proper, conservative suits on, and then goes bare underneath them. She unbuckles his belt and then unbuttons and unzips his fly, and his stance is wide so his pants sink a bit but don't fall, and she doesn't even look down at him.

She brushes her knuckles, up and down, over the line of hair between his navel and his groin, and she leans in to kiss his jaw and talk softly into his ear. "I think you need to be quiet now," she says, laying out her terms. "Don't say a word, even when I make you come."

"Olivia," he groans quietly. "_Fuck!_"

She puts a hand over his mouth and uses it to tilt his head. "Control yourself, Detective," she says, serious, but teasing a bit, and then she puts her mouth on his neck.

He tenses, but he stands still and he doesn't try to talk, and she drops her hand and slides it carefully between his legs, into the open fly of his pants. He's hard and still tucked into the fabric, and she slides her palm down over his warm length, and he sucks his breath in and tilts his head back against the wall and every muscle in his body seems to flex and stay rigid. She can sense the effort it's taking him to restrain himself. She eases his cock out, giving him a tight squeeze, and then she takes her hand away. He exhales.

She drags her mouth downward. When she reaches his chest, she starts marking him. She sucks at his skin, and then she licks at his nipple, and then she scrapes her teeth across his clavicle. The handcuff chain clinks and slides above her, but his arms stay secure. She moves down, slowly, and he breathes noisily above her, his chest rising and falling rapidly with his excitement. She sucks small, dark bruises into the soft skin of his stomach, and then she drags her teeth over his ribs, and when she finally nudges her way under the waistband of his pants and gives him a real bite on his hip, he gives a breathless groan and she hears a metallic creak. She glances up then to see his fingers curled around the hook, his sleeves falling down his forearms and his muscles standing out in stark relief. His head is tilted back and his eyes are closed, and he has his mouth firmly shut but is breathing, hard, through his nose and everything about that image goes straight to her core and makes her want him.

He's pressing his hips forward toward her, and she pushes him back again, and gives him a tickling kiss along the top of his thigh. She could give him head, but she's not in the mood to fight him when he's so wound up. It's been a long, hard day.

Instead she grabs his cock in her hand and gives him a rough tug. He thrusts into her hand, and she does it again. Then she stands and slides one hand behind his head, pulling his mouth down to hers. He kisses her eagerly and pants into her mouth, and she twists her other hand around his cock and starts stroking him. The metal hook and her wall start creaking again as his hands tighten and pull, and he makes a low sound and drops his mouth from hers, breathing too hard to kiss her. She scrapes her nails through his hair and over his scalp, and she keeps up the pace on his cock, steady and tight and just a little too rough, and he grits his teeth and groans, and then his shoulders slam back against the wall and he's coming.

She lightens her touch, stroking him slowly through it, and he gasps in her ear, his forehead pressed to her temple. Her hand is slippery and she can hear wet drops hitting her floor, and she is almost uncomfortably aroused.

She lets go of him as he suddenly relaxes back against the wall.

"Fuck," he swears, quietly, still breathing hard. He squeezes his eyes shut and his head droops. "Fuck."

She gives him a moment, wiping her hand in the tails of her shirt.

As he comes back to her and his breathing calms, he sags a bit more against the cuffs and pulls on them steadily. She can feel the energy draining out of him. He twists his wrists in the cuffs though, and she glances up, seeing red smudges against his skin.

"You're bleeding, El," she says, softly, rubbing her thumb over his hair-roughened jaw. "Don't."

"So what," he rasps, just as softly, and he doesn't look at her.

He breaks her heart a little more again. She rests her forehead against him briefly. She doesn't know how to give him what he needs without hurting him. She doesn't know how to get that pain out of him. She has enough of her own to know it's not an easy fix.

She reaches up and pushes his arms up, leading the cuff chain over the hook and bringing his arms slowly down. He exhales slowly and rolls his head and shoulders a bit, but when he glances at her, his eyes hold a mixture of bliss and hurt. She finds his cuff key and frees him, and he puts his hands on her immediately, sliding them over her shoulders and around her neck and bringing her close to him. She stands in his arms, and he doesn't say anything, just keeps her close, and she understands. She remembers how she'd felt after he'd untied her. It had felt so draining, and she'd been exhausted. She'd felt utterly… exposed, open to any hurt he wanted to throw her way. But he'd been soft and warm and he'd told her he needed her, and then he'd slept so close to her that she'd felt his weight and his heat all night long.

She peels his shirt from his arms, carefully avoiding his wounded wrists, and she finds that her hands are steady, even though she feels a little shaky inside. _This is too much_, she thinks. _Way too much._

This thing between them is not going away, and it's not getting easier, and it's very, very heavy. Her own breath feels hard.

"Shoes," she says. And he leans down to slide them off along with his socks. She shoves his pants down and he sheds them and then he's naked, and she grabs him by the hand and leads him into the bathroom. She turns on the shower and strips next to the counter while he steps into the tub. When she climbs in behind him, the water is nice and hot, and he pulls her between him and the wall and lets the spray pour over her. They don't talk. She soaps him up, and then herself, and he slides his hands over her, backs her into the wall and kisses her, and he's already hard again, but he's calm. He's relaxed and a bit languid and he is okay with it as she pushes him gently back and takes his wrists and washes them.

When they're out of the shower and dry, she inspects his wrists. His jaw tightens and his face darkens as he watches her, but he doesn't say anything. He isn't angry. She's having a hard time reading him at all now. He was open during the sex, and now he's closing off, and she understands that. The cuts aren't as bad as they seemed at first, and she bandages them up.

"You don't need to do that," he complains.

"You're not bleeding on my sheets," she retorts.

As soon as she's done, he's backing her, naked, into her bedroom, and she trips in the darkness and falls onto her bed. He crawls over her, and he's already breathing faster, and she's surprised then at how aroused she still is, even though she hadn't come when he did.

He kisses down her body, not as rough as she'd been, but serious about it. He sucks at her nipples and uses his weight to hold her down. He licks over her stomach and takes big mouthfuls of her skin, and then he lays his teeth on her, bites down, but not hard enough to hurt. He leaves a wet, warm trail over her body that cools in the open air. When he pulls her legs apart and sucks at the inside of her thighs, she tenses and bites her lip. Every nerve in her body feels wire-taut, and maybe she's been edging for a while. Maybe having him in cuffs has affected her more than she realized. Maybe it was more than that.

His tongue touches her clit lightly, and then faster, and then he's there with all the force and intensity that he puts into everything, and she can't stop the sounds coming from her throat. Or the way her hips twists underneath him. The feeling washes through her whole body, and in seconds it's almost too late. God. _God._

She grabs his shoulder. "El." She gives a ragged breath. "Stop. I'm gonna come."

He does. She's surprised, in a hazy sort of way, but when he climbs up over her body and settles his hips between her legs and she looks up at him, his expression is consuming. He slides inside of her, and he does so carefully and not in full thrusts, and he is trying to keep her on that edge, she realizes. It helps. He slides back and forth, and he doesn't press his hips down into hers fully, and it is a slow burn that saves her, and brings him closer. He shuts his eyes and groans quietly and keeps moving and moving, slowly and steadily, and as his breath deepens, so do his thrusts. Until his body is rocking hers, and she doesn't even need him to touch her with his fingers. She arches up against him and he hits her right, and she says his name, breathless and loud, and then she is digging her fingers into his lower back and pulling him against her and she is coming on low, powerful waves that completely shut down her mind for a while. Somewhere in the middle of that she feels him jerk against her, swearing softly, and he comes, pushing her down further into the mattress.

She is exhausted then, and boneless, and he rests on top of her for awhile, before sliding to her side. Her heart is still thumping as she lies in the cool air and stares at the shadows on her bedroom ceiling. It is still too early to go to bed, but weariness is stealing over her. She takes sleep when she can get it these days.

There is a heaviness inside of her as she listens to Elliot breathe. Some shadow creeping up on her that she doesn't want to see. Everything he and the job stir inside of her is swirling and mixing and she can taste all of it. Trying to look directly at it makes her feel anxious.

He turns on his side and slides one arm around her waist. He kisses her neck, almost chastely, and she curls her arm up to slip her hand over his jaw. "Why did you think you'd hurt me?" she asks, softly, thinking about his earlier words. Before she took the cuffs and put them on him.

He doesn't reply for a while, but he shifts and inhales slowly. "Because I hurt everybody," he finally says, his words a rumble against her skin. "Eventually."

She thinks about that for a long time before falling asleep.

[]

The next day, Elliot apologizes to Cragen, and Cragen takes it, and she sits at her desk and watches Elliot work. He is calm and quiet, but she can see the lines in his face, and she thinks he is in pain. He is wearing long sleeves, but every so often she sees his fingers dip under his cuff and touch the red marks she knows are there. Every so often she sees them, looking angry and painful, as his cuffs ride up. The memory makes her feel desperate and guilty and a little turned on.

Cragen doesn't watch Elliot. He watches her. And when Elliot runs down to the evidence locker for another case, Cragen calls her into his office.

"How is he really?" he asks as he closes the door behind her.

She stands stiffly, because her loyalty to Elliot runs deep, and she's not going to stab him in the back. Cragen, of course, knows all of this.

"Olivia," he says, quietly, as he walks around his desk and faces her. "I'm not asking because I want to take his badge. If he's struggling, I need to know."

Her mouth is so dry she couldn't answer if she'd wanted to. This job is her purpose. It's her lifeline and it's her greatest pain, and Elliot is the one who gave her this. He trained her and he walks at her side, and he is there for the triumphs and he is there for the horrible, horrible anguish, and even the fact that she is now sleeping with him is minor compared to everything else. "He's fine," she finally manages, her voice sounding like it's scraping against her throat. "It's just been a hard year, Captain. We're all a little tired."

Cragen studies her, not without sympathy. He's been where she is now. He knows.

"The average shelf life of an SVU detective is three years," he tells her. "You know that. You're coming up on that yourself. But Elliot has been here eight years already. I need you to tell me when he's had enough, because he never will."

It feels like her insides are tearing a bit. "Captain," she protests, and it sounds a bit like a whine to her.

"Olivia," he interrupts, his voice harder now. "You care about him, I know that. You two are close, and I don't ask questions because you work well together, and you keep each other sane. You need to care about him enough to keep him that way. I've seen too many cops get too tired and go home and eat their own gun. The fuck if I'm letting that happen to Elliot too."

And that scares her. She stares at him, and it feels like there is a ball of cold lead in her stomach, and she nods, slowly. "Okay."

He nods back. "He's never been an easy man to work with, but he's been a downright terror the past few months. If he doesn't snap out of it, I'm going to have to do something about it."

It's a notice for her to dig deeper, and she knows he doesn't have to do this for them. Another captain would have suspended Elliot on the spot the day before, in David Jordan's office parking lot.

"Okay," she says, quietly. "Okay."

[]

It still takes her several weeks to start that digging.

They're at the courthouse, and they've sat all week at a rape trial where the victim's morality and character becomes the whole focus. And she can feel Elliot, next to her in the galley, as he tenses up and relaxes again and again, because this is old hat for them and they can smell when the tide is turning. He clears his throat more than once, like he wants to get up and start raging, and she presses her knee against his and bumps his shoulder in warning.

When the jury comes back not guilty, he simply gets up and walks out without even glancing at her.

She finds him minutes later pacing in an empty alcove near the stairs. "Hey," she asks, needlessly. "You okay?"

He shakes his head and clenches his jaw, and he says, "I can't believe that bastard got away with it."

She doesn't know what to tell him. He knows the way it works. He's working himself up though, to a good head of steam, and if she doesn't do something soon she's going to spend the rest of the day trying to drag him off people and defending his back.

"C'mon," she says, softly. "Let's get out of here. We haven't had lunch yet."

He glances at her, and she risks a touch. It's quiet in the alcove, and she can hear voices but no one is in their line of sight. She touches his arm, sliding her fingers down to brush his wrist, and he holds her gaze and takes a breath and nods.

[]

They go to a small Chinese-American place a few blocks away. It's a nice walk that siphons off some energy, and the restaurant is nearly empty in the hours right after the lunch rush. They get a plate of egg rolls and some iced tea, and it smells so good that Elliot finally caves and orders a combo portion of chicken and broccoli.

It is quiet and comfortable, and she steals bits from his plate and asks, "You ever think about transferring out?"

He meets her gaze and studies her for a moment while he finishes his mouthful of broccoli. "Sometimes," he says. "You don't?"

She shrugs. "Sure." She glances down and wipes at the condensation on her glass of iced tea. "It's just… You've been in this job for eight years now. You know the average is two to three."

He pauses for a long moment, his fork resting on his plate, and then he asks, quietly, "What is this about, Liv?"

She winces then, because she should have known he'd see through her.

When she hesitates too long, he adds, "Is this about the handcuffs a few weeks ago?"

"No," she insists, and then she falters. "Maybe a little. But mostly no. You just seem so angry lately."

"We keep losing," he argues.

"And we're always going to, sometimes," she says. "But you can't let anything go."

"I'm not just going to give up on a victim," he says, sullenly.

She leans across the table toward him, trying to look into his eyes. "And I'm not either, but we have to prioritize, and you… You're letting it eat you up inside."

He puts his fork down and rubs tiredly at his face. "Wait'll you've been here eight years. See how you feel."

She sighs. This isn't supposed to be a fight. "I don't doubt that, El," she says, trying to pick her words carefully. "Maybe it won't even take that long for me. It tears me up right now, and I haven't been here nearly as long as you have. Maybe… Maybe you need to start thinking about… You've just seemed so miserable lately."

He looks a little betrayed, and it slices into her heart like a knife. He lays one hand on the table, palm up, in supplication. "I'm not miserable. I don't want to leave you. We're partners, Liv."

She slides her palm over his, feeling a rush at the friction. "We're more than that," she says. Gives. Because it's an admission.

He holds her gaze, and he swallows heavily, and his fingers close around her wrist. "You want me to quit?"

She thinks about that. "No. I don't." She sighs again. "I want you to not be in pain."

"I'm okay."

"Will you tell me when you're not okay?"

"Yeah."

She takes that, because her choice is to either trust him or go behind his back to Cragen, and she just can't do that. Maybe she's making a mountain out of a molehill. He's always been hot tempered and sensitive to this job. He feels too much, and he struggles with the emotion, but he's not like that every minute. Maybe he just needs some time…

Maybe.

[]

It's Thanksgiving when she starts to wonder if that molehill is a mountain after all.

The cases themselves have been the usual sort of horrible, but there is still a ghost haunting them, and even after Cragen's warning Elliot can't let her go. They still have the right to work the Justine Foster case, they simply have to stay away from David Jordan unless they have reasonable suspicions. Beyond their own sixth sense that is. They're mostly doing okay though, until right before the holiday, when Justine's parents come into the precinct and ask what else they've done on the case. All she and Elliot can really say is that they haven't forgotten about it, and they continue to watch the pharmacies, looking for a lead on asthma medicine.

"So, you've basically given up, is that it?" Justine's mother asks. She's angry, and she has every right to be, but this is a no win situation for everyone.

"We haven't," Olivia says, gently. "I promise. We're just… limited in what we can do."

"We're sorry," Elliot adds, and he looks stricken, and kids have always been the worst for him.

"But you know who did this, don't you," the father accuses.

Elliot swallows. "We have no solid leads." And Olivia can see that it's killing him to deliver the party line.

"Right." The father is disgusted with them, but he doesn't start anything. He grabs his wife's hand and they walk silently away, and Olivia glances at Elliot and he is staring at the floor.

"We're doing the best we can," she tells him, softly.

He looks at her. "Are we really?" He's angry again.

She steps closer to him, trying to get intimate without being obvious. "We can't help everyone," she says, feeling her own anger spark a bit at just the thought, but her worry for him is trumping everything else. "We can only do what we can do."

He watches her for a moment, jaw flexing, and then he says, "That's not good enough." And he walks away.

She sighs.

[]

She works Thanksgiving day with Munch, as usual. The two of them usually volunteer so Fin can see his family and Elliot can see his kids. Holidays seem to get tougher the older she gets. When she was younger, it wasn't a big deal to work, to have only her mother there to share them with, and then often drunk and unpleasant. But this is her first major holiday without even her mother, and it drives home the fact that she is now truly alone in the world.

Except for Elliot and Munch and Fin. And a few scattered college friends she's only barely kept in touch with over the years.

The job has sustained her for a long time, and she still feels the fire inside of her that drives it all. She can't help them all, but she can help some. She can help some women, some children, some men who would get no help at all if it wasn't for her. And it _is_ enough, because it has to be. For now, it has to be.

At the same time, she thinks that she can now see the benefit of having someone in your life. Someone to help you deal. She hadn't been ready for that when she'd slept with Brian Cassidy, and even if she had been she probably wouldn't have dated him. But Elliot…

They're not really dating, and they aren't _not_ dating, and nothing is the way people tell her relationships should be. But she knows he will affect her life in some way, shape or form, regardless of whether he's there in the flesh or not over the years. If they stopped being partners tomorrow, would they have anything to base a life on?

[]

He calls her late on Thanksgiving night, and as he talks she can hear the sound of passing traffic and the rumble of the engine as he drives.

"Where are you?" she demands.

He pauses for a moment and then he says, "Outside Jordan's townhouse."

She takes a breath and rubs tiredly at her forehead. "El," she says.

"It's a holiday. Maybe he figures the cops will take a day off and he can sneak Roger in without anyone knowing the difference."

"How long have you been there?"

"I came over early in the morning, and then left to have dinner with the kids. Came back just after dark tonight."

"See anything?"

"No," he answers, and she can hear the annoyance in his voice.

"Get out of there before Jordan reports a prowler and they find you sitting there. Cragen will fire you on the spot, Elliot."

"What's it going to take to break this guy, Olivia? Because I'm willing to do it."

"I don't know," she says, quietly. "Maybe we need to consider the fact that he's not involved."

"I've done that eight thousand times over the past few months, and it just doesn't sit right with me."

She knows. She feels the same way. But sometimes patience is their only weapon. Their only legal weapon. And she has to believe in the legalities of the system, even if they don't always work. It's her job to get the most from what she has. It's his job too, but he's been stretching it for a long time now.

He knocks on her door half an hour later, and she lets him in with a chastising look, but he is too agitated to pay much attention. He paces and she can see his mind mulling over the case and his anger building, and she grabs him by the shoulder as he passes her and puts her hand on the back of his neck and says, "Elliot, you have to calm down."

And he slides his hands into her hair and kisses her.

For both of them, sex is the ultimate salve for anger, and even if it doesn't cure the rage, it saps the energy from it. For a while at least.

In minutes, she has his shirt off and has him against the wall, her tongue in his mouth, her fingers laced with his as she presses him back.

"Use the cuffs," he growls, breathlessly, and she feels a tendril of excitement, and then apprehension. He hasn't even mentioned cuffs or ties or anything about binding since the day she cuffed him to the hook in her living room. She'd been writing it all off as a one time thing. Well… two time thing.

"No," she says, swallowing. "I don't want you to hurt yourself. Your wrists were scabbed over for two weeks the last time."

He ducks his head forward, trying to kiss her deeper, his mouth hungry. "I loved that, Olivia," he says, into her mouth. "I loved feeling them there and running my fingers over the marks and feeling it all over again."

She hesitates, reluctant, because it seems like something beyond a game, and he nuzzles in against her neck and then her ear and he murmurs, "You liked it, Olivia. I know you did. You liked it too."

And she swallows, because there is already heat between her legs and she knows she's wet, and he won't have to do much to figure it out. She pushes him back against the wall and holds him there for a moment, and then she goes and grabs her cuffs and a pair of clean, cropped socks from her drawer. He frowns at her when she comes back, but he stays obediently against the wall. She takes his wrist and wraps the sock around it and then one cuff, and when she looks up at him his brows are furrowed and his gaze intense but he nods slowly.

"Okay," he says. "Compromise."

She does cuff his arms behind his back this time, and his shoulders bulge under the strain. He watches her raptly, with shadowed eyes, and his chest heaves a bit with his excitement, but she moves deliberately and patiently. There is something… soothing about the process of this. Of taking care of him and making sure he's just how she wants him. Of having his anger and his chaotic rage and all the strength in his body locked down and under her control.

She unbuckles his belt slowly, and he reacts to it with hard swallows and flexing muscles, and she's overwhelmed a bit by the sparks firing along her skin and in her blood. She doesn't bother working him over the way she did last time. He's so hard that she can feel his pulse beating in his shaft when she grabs him, so she just lazily goes down on him and listens to the clank of the cuffs as he pulls at them. She fills her mouth with him and gets the taste of him deep on her tongue, and he swears breathlessly and pushes into her mouth as much as he can, and she hears his joints crack as he strains against the cuffs, but they hold him beautifully.

He warns her when he's going to come, but she ignores him and invites it, and he says, "Olivia, fuck!" as he comes, like he always does, and she's still, _still_ not sick of that.

[]

Later, she lies beside him, rubbing her fingers absently over his wrist. There are faint red marks, but no cuts. Nothing like last time.

"Why do you need this?" she asks, quietly.

He is quiet for a long moment, and she wonders if he's fallen asleep, and then he says, "I don't know. I don't _need_ it. I just…" He trails off and falls silent.

"I don't like hurting you," she admits.

"You're not hurting me," he states. "You're…" He pauses. "It's not about feeling pain, it's about… feeling something else."

He says 'something else' like he's mystified, and she falls silent and thinks about that. There are many kinds of pain, she thinks, and the physical sort can be much easier to bear than the emotional.

"I see," she says.

"Do you?" he asks.

"Yes."

[]

She gets a chance to test her theory when Vice pulls several simultaneous raids around the city and comes away with an assortment of johns and sex workers, and she and Elliot are roped into helping.

She finds herself sitting at her desk with Tanya King, who has been in the game for a while and knows the deal. She says nothing incriminating and she knows how to talk to police, although they've talked to her before and Olivia knows she's a professional dominatrix.

Tanya is sharp though, and she gives the standard line that what she does is not any more sexual than a strip club, and that no money passes hands. If they can't prove it, then she knows they'll have to let her go. Frankly, Olivia is sort of ambivalent about the whole thing anyway. She's more worried about the danger Tanya and her girls face in their work than she is about putting them in jail. For most prostitutes on the street, it's a career born from a chaotic childhood, maybe not so unlike her own, and often it's a last resort. Tanya is different. She's chosen her career with care and attends to it as carefully as any CEO. She's educated and she makes a lot of money.

Olivia is about to let her go, because Vice really does have nothing on her, when she hesitates.

The squad room is quiet and growing dark. Everyone else is in interrogation or they've gone home. Olivia stares down at her form and taps her pen, and then she looks up at Tanya King. "Can I ask you something?"

Tanya lifts her brows as if to say, 'do I have a choice?'

"Off the record, I mean," Olivia amends.

Tanya's brows furrow, and she studies Olivia speculatively. "You can ask," she agrees, leaving the implication that she might not answer.

Olivia sighs and licks her lips, and tries to think about how to phrase her question. She can see Elliot from the corner of her eye at the far end of the department, combing through a filing cabinet. "People who enjoy being tied up," she says, quietly, meeting Tanya's gaze. "Is there something… I mean…" She hesitates, not sure where she wants to go with this. "Where does that come from?"

Tanya looks surprised then. She stares at Olivia for a long beat, and then lifts one delicate brow. "Don't tell me, good-looking female cop like you, I bet the guys all make comments about the handcuffs."

Olivia snorts at that, smiling faintly. "No," she says. "Well, yes," she corrects as she thinks about it. "But I'm not talking about them. I'm serious. I'd like to know."

Tanya's scrutiny becomes more focused. "You don't strike me as the type," she says, dryly.

Olivia's eyes wander to Elliot's back, across the room and over Tanya's shoulder, and then she loses her courage. "Yeah," she says, quickly. "You're right. Forget it."

Tanya smirks. "On the other hand, some of the kinkiest people I know are cops."

Olivia sighs and rubs wearily at her forehead. "I shouldn't have asked. I'm sorry."

At that, Tanya's hand suddenly closes warmly over her own, and Olivia is startled. She freezes, hyper-alert. "I didn't tell you this before," Tanya says, quietly. "Because I just wanted to get out of here, and it didn't matter. But last year, one of my best friends, a girl I mentored into the business, was raped. And you and your partner handled her case."

Olivia stares at her in surprise. She remembers now… "Her name was Melanie," she says, absently.

Tanya nods. "You treated her well, Detective. You didn't act like she deserved what she got because she was a sex worker. You caught the fucker who did it, and you gave her some numbers to call so she could get her head right again. She never forgot that. And I didn't either."

Olivia swallows. "I'm glad," she says, softly.

Tanya's hand squeezes hers. "Tell me what you want to know. I'll answer, and no one will ever hear about you from me."

Olivia stares at her, strangely grateful and oddly touched. "Okay," she says. "Can I get you some coffee?"

"Yes," Tanya says, sitting back in her chair and crossing her legs smoothly. "That would be nice."

[]

"Look," Tanya says, as they sip the precinct's bad coffee. "I'm not saying that these things are normal per se, and I hate that word, by the way. Normal. The desire for them comes from somewhere, and it's not from out of the blue. But however you got here, you're here now, and that's okay. The healthy part is realizing your issues and realizing that you need something different. It's in not lying to yourself. It's in finding a way to be safe so you don't hurt others and they don't hurt you. It's finding someone to trust."

Olivia stares at her. "What was your major in college again?"

"Psychology." Tanya gives her a satisfied smile.

"What if someone likes the pain, but you don't like hurting them?"

"Well… You have to figure out why they enjoy it. Is it just a release valve? Or is it a sexual kink? If it's just a release valve, and they're dealing with anger or guilt, then you have to find the reason that pressure is building up, and take care of it. If it's a sexual kink, well…" She shrugs with a small smile. "Then you're fucked."

"Thanks," Olivia remarks, dryly.

"It's also about trust," Tanya adds. "It's always about trust. The tied person is vulnerable. They trust the other person to take care of them. It's an incredibly intimate exchange. You can't discount that."

Olivia sighs. Then nods.

"You're not hurting them," Tanya says quietly. "You're giving them something they need. Emotions are a hard hill for most people."

Tanya finishes her coffee, and Olivia releases her and finds an officer to take her home. "Call me," she says. "If you ever need help."

Tanya gives her a wistful smile. "Thanks, detective. Call me if you ever need advice. Or, you know, if you ever just want to learn the ropes." She smirks.

Olivia grins then, and has to turn away.

[]

He gets a little distant after that, and she figures it's a lot of things. They seem okay together, and he still sleeps with her more often than he stays at home, but Justine Foster is still out there, and the winter is piercing in its cold. December is long with gray skies and unhappy endings. Maybe too it's the couples they see out at night, with the city dressed for Christmas. At the precinct holiday party, everyone brings their spouse, and they have to sit together but apart and Elliot watches as she talks to Brian Cassidy for maybe a little too long. Not because she wants to date him, but because it looks better. Like she and Elliot don't have a secret they're keeping from the brass.

They leave separately, and Elliot is waiting at her place when she gets there. He is melancholy, but he's also drunk, and she's had maybe more than usual. Instead of having sex, he falls asleep next to her, and she listens to him breathe and thinks, _is this still working?_

It can't go on forever, she realizes. And maybe that's always been her biggest fear.

[]


	5. Alright

Tonight I lack the strength to even move. When you walked, now watch me die. For I know this is harder for you, for love has let you down, yeah, c'mon. The road ahead is lined with broken dreams, so walk, walk on by. And I failed to give you everything you need,  
For the fears, behind your eyes. When I can't feel you, I'm not alright, I'm not alright. When I can't heal you, I'm not alright, I'm not alright. Tell me now that it wasn't all for naught. It's such a waste now, it's such a waste now, c'mon. Cause I know you're scared but, baby, don't you hide. And it's such a waste. And you'll stand alone now, you'll make it somehow.(alright by pilot speed)

 

Part Five

[]

Elliot asks for time off the week before and over Christmas, and both she and Cragen breathe a sigh of relief. He needs time with his kids, and maybe Olivia needs a little time to herself too. Cragen has her run down peripheral information for Munch and Fin, and sometimes he sends her to scenes if they've been secured, so no one shoots her in the back as she investigates alone. And still, he asks her from time to time about Elliot, and she keeps telling him Elliot is fine, but he's becoming less and less convinced.

She doesn't want that pressure on her head, ending Elliot's career in SVU. He can transfer, yes, but he's stayed as long as he has for a reason, the same way she intends to stay as long as she can, and she doesn't want to take that away from him. Maybe she also doesn't want to lose him, and if they aren't partners anymore, then what else would they be? _You could date_, her inner voice tones, and she knows it's the logical move. And still she can't place him in that same category as Michael and Brian and all the other men she's dated and discarded. Or who have found her too trying and have walked away.

She fucks up just before Christmas. Maybe her head is just too mixed up, or maybe the pressure is getting to her, she doesn't know. But she works a rape case with Fin and her senses are off. The woman's exam comes back inconclusive, and her affect is off, and Olivia decides it's a false report. Fin argues with her, but when she goes into interrogation, she rips the woman up one side and down the other, and Cragen finally comes in and pulls her out. She is just angry, because they have so many other bad cases, and this woman is wasting their time. Time that Justine Foster could be spending in agony, or maybe in the cold, cold ground already dead.

Then Fin nabs the rapist, and he confesses, and his story matches the victim's to a T.

She almost throws her dinner up in the middle of the squad room.

She apologizes, and at least it was caught before they'd gone further with the case, but she knows that's cold comfort to the victim. She just made the worst day of a woman's life even more terrible, and that's not something she just bounces back from.

It's all too much. She doesn't want to make another decision again for as long as she lives. She doesn't want to have peoples' fates in her hands anymore.

"It's part of the job, Olivia," Cragen tells her, and there's an edge to his voice. She thinks he must be very tired of dealing with her and Elliot this year. But then he gets softer. "You're on call tomorrow. I won't call you in unless it's absolutely necessary. Enjoy Christmas day for once and relax. Come back feeling stronger."

For the first time she wants to tell him to forget it, to transfer her out, to make sure she can't mess up anymore lives. And he sees it on her face.

"If you didn't feel that way, then I'd have you out of here in a heartbeat. But I'm not letting you go now. You go home and you do whatever you have to do to deal with this, and then you come back and you work again, and you start saving people."

And, really, what can she say to that? Logically she knows that she'll feel better in a day or two, and Cragen's faith in her is reassuring, even if she still feels like shit.

She sits in the crib and stares at the floor because she can't stand to talk to anyone else that night. And she can't stand to hear the holiday carols and see the lights. The guilt makes her sleepless and fidgety and she scrubs at her face with shaking hands until she can't stand it anymore. She calls Elliot.

She doesn't expect him to be home, so when he answers she is surprised into silence for a moment. "Hey," she finally says. "I thought you'd be with your kids tonight. Christmas Eve."

"I spent all day with them," he says. "Kathy's taking them to her mother's for the rest of the holiday."

"Oh. I'm sorry," she says.

"It's okay. It was a good week."

"Good."

"I've been trying to call your cell all evening," he says. "You catch a case?"

She swallows then. "Yeah. Sorry. It's on silent and I haven't checked in a while."

He's quiet for a moment and then he says, "Liv, what is it?"

And she sags a bit, because he notices. Because she wants to tell him exactly what happened, and at the same time she doesn't want him to know at all. She swallows again, feeling wetness against her eyelids. "I, uh… didn't have my finest hour today."

"Are you okay?"

She hestitates, not knowing quite how to answer that.

"I mean, did you get hurt?" he clarifies, and his voice is almost militant.

"No," she says. "Not me. I… I thought a victim was lying about her rape."

He breathes, and she listens to him.

"It's okay," he says. "It happens."

She wants to laugh at that. At how often they use that nonsensical phrase to hand wave their own faults. _It happens. It just happens._ As if they have no control over themselves.

"Come over," he says.

"I don't think I'd be good company," she says.

"You don't have to be. I'll be good enough for both of us."

She does laugh at that, because he's not always very funny.

"C'mon," he says. "It's Christmas Eve, Liv. You should be here."

And she nods, even though he can't see her. "Okay."

[]

She wonders at the way they seem to run to each other. When he's bad off, he comes to her place. When she's suffering, she goes to his. Coincidence? Or some strange power balance that shifts between them endlessly.

When she walks through his door, she stops in surprise. She hasn't been here in a few weeks, and he has lights up and a tree, and of course he would, because his kids were visiting. But it still feels strange to her.

"Hey," he says, brows furrowed, as he walks up to her. He's in jeans and a sweatshirt, and she feels like she hasn't seen him in _years_.

"Hey," she says, roughly.

He puts an arm around her neck and kisses her and pulls her coat off, and then they sit on his sofa and she says, "I fucked up."

"Yeah," he agrees. His voice is even, and she's just glad he isn't trying to tell her that it isn't her fault. "So you learn from this and next time you fuck up a little less."

She takes a long, slow breath. "Maybe there shouldn't be a next time."

"Bullshit," he says, sharply. "There _will_ be a next time, and one after that, and probably one after that too. That's the way it goes, Olivia, and you know it. We're human. We fuck up."

God, do they.

She bends over a bit, bracing her elbows on her knees and burying her face in her hands. "God. That's what Cragen said too. He told me to suck it up and move on."

"You can't change the past," Elliot says. "Only the future."

She asks, "Can I take a shower?"

He nods. Then, "You…want me to come with you?"

She smiles faintly at that. "No. I just… I think I could use the time."

He lets her go, and she goes into his bedroom and then she gets into his shower and turns it as hot as she can stand. It helps, standing under the hard wash of the hot spray, still feeling like a hundred pounds of weight is on her shoulders, but realizing that those closest to her don't think she's a total asshole. Not that it helps the victim…

She dries off and sits on his bed, and she feels strangely apathetic. He has a pile of clean clothes stacked there, and she grabs one of his flannel shirts from the top and slips it on, and then she goes and stands in the doorway and looks out at him as he sits in the living room watching TV. He looks up.

"I don't want to… make any more decisions tonight," she says, softly. "I just… don't want to think about anything."

He holds her gaze for a moment and then he switches off the TV and stands, and she feels her mouth run dry. She's not really sure what she's doing, but she hears Tanya King's voice in her mind saying, _ "… however you got here, you're here now, and it's okay."_

He comes toward her, slowly, and then he puts his hands on her head and he leans down close and he says, "What do you want?" Like he did before.

And she shakes her head, because he's not getting it. "I want to not decide," she says. "I want… I want to be…" And then the words just stop coming, and she has no idea what to say. She wants to have all decisions made for her. She wants to have no responsibilities. She wants to just feel like someone is taking care of her. And she doesn't know how to even tell him that, or what he'd even do about it. She doesn't want to be tied up, although she'd do it if he asked, because she's pretty sure that's not really her thing so much. But she wants something, and she doesn't know what.

He's tilting her head up so he can look in her eyes, and then he leans down and he presses his lips to hers, and she opens her mouth for him. He kisses her for a while, and then he looks at her again, and his gaze is piercing, and it makes her heart speed up because he's seeing something in her eyes and she has no idea what it is. "Stay here," he says.

And then he goes into his kitchen and she hears him pouring a drink. When he comes back, he has a finger of amber liquid in a glass, and he hands it to her. "Drink it," he orders.

She takes it but doesn't drink.

"Drink it," he says, quietly. "You're too wound up."

She drinks. Her blood warms up immediately. It's enough take the edge off her nerves, but not even close to enough to get her buzzed. He takes the glass from her again, and sets it on a bookshelf, and then he says, "Get in the bedroom, Olivia."

She blinks at him, and he steps close to her, pressing his lips to her forehead and then looking down at her. "You want this?" he asks. "You want to give up the power tonight?"

It clicks then, and she swallows. She feels suddenly very warm and excited and ridiculous and turned on. Is this what he feels when she puts the handcuffs on him, she wonders. She nods slowly.

"Then get. In. The bedroom. Olivia." He enunciates each word.

And she goes.

It's about flowing then. It's letting herself go and trusting herself in his hands, and it is like all the weight melts off of her and leaves her bare and spinning and a little euphoric.

"Stop," he says, when she starts to take his shirt off. "Leave it." And all she can feel are his hands and his breath, and he says, "Put your palms on the wall." And she does. And he takes her that way, so close to that first time in the parking garage, but without that desperate edge of rage. He strips off and leans against her back, and she feels drunk even though she barely had a shot. His hands cover hers and press them hard against the wall as he moves inside of her, and it takes a while. He tells her what he wants her to do and he sucks at her nape, and it's like she's being consumed by everything. Pleasure, pain, him, herself, the whole fucking world. She does nothing but rest her forehead against the wall, listen to their breathing, and feel him. When she comes she feels like she's not even part of reality anymore. He must come too, because she feels it between her legs, but she is still so wired and weary at the same time that she doesn't really know. She is weak afterwards, and he grabs her up and she feels his sheets and his mattress beneath her, and she just sinks down into the relief and the warmth and her own dark sleep.

[]

When she wakes, the daylight is flooding into the room and Elliot is lying next to her, looking at her. She stares back for a moment, blankly, until the night comes back to her, and then she feels her skin heat up. She doesn't know what to say. To him or to herself.

"Olivia," he says, voice sleep-rough.

She swallows thickly and meets his gaze.

"Go make me breakfast," he orders.

She blinks at him and then furrows her brows. "Bite me."

He laughs then, grinning, and turns over onto his back, and she rolls her eyes.

"I knew my luck would never hold until this morning," he says. "You'd be right back to the same old Olivia."

"Oh, screw you," she says, shoving at him in irritation, but she's starting to smile now because he hasn't been this cheerful in months, and it's a welcome sight.

He leans over and kisses her, briefly but deep, and says, "We have all day for that." And then he slides out of bed and heads toward the bathroom.

She snorts in pretended scorn, but smiles when he shuts the door behind him. It's Christmas day, she realizes. She wonders if he'll want to go to church. Will he want her to go with him? Should she? And what about gifts? They agreed in their first year to never buy each other gifts. They go out for drinks on holidays or they spring for their favorite Thai food, but they don't buy each other wallets or scarves or jewelry. But they weren't sleeping together before either. She feels suddenly awkward and apprehensive about how to spend the day with him.

_Jesus. Suck it up, Olivia._

And this is what she hates about relationships. The way you have to _do_ things and you're supposed to know _what_ to do and _when_ to do it, and it's all just a gigantic puzzle to her.

She throws the blankets off and pulls on some underwear and Elliot's shirt she was wearing the night before. God, it's so cliché, but she doesn't care. Sometimes cliches are cliches for a reason. Because they work.

She puts the coffee on in the kitchen, and then she opens his refrigerator, and he has so much food that her eyes widen. And, of course, he would have since his kids had been there that week, but he has eggs and bacon and milk and cheese and ham slices and fresh produce and about eight different plastic containers of leftovers that are unidentifiable but look delicious.

She has not had a good omelet in forever, so she pulls out the eggs and ham and cheese and onion and spreads them over the counter and starts working. When she catches the Christmas tree out of the corner of her eye, it feels festive, not lonely. And she thinks, _Shit. I'm really fucked now._

Elliot comes into the kitchen in shorts and a T-shirt, and he smells like soap, and he blinks at her and then grins and wraps his arms around her and says, "This day is getting better and better!"

"Don't get used to it," she warns.

He leans against the counter and pulls her between his legs and against him while she watches the huge omelet she made cook in a pan, and he says, "Merry Christmas, Liv."

She bites her lip and says, "Merry Christmas."

And for one whole day, she feels like all the Christmas carols are true stories.

[]

There are some crimes that stun her with their complexity. Most of their cases are impulse crimes. People find themselves with an unusual opportunity. People get angry. People do horrible things when they have a broken heart. People take drugs and drink and their nasty natures come out to play.

But sometimes people plan things. Sometimes they spend years working out each little detail and it is their entire life's work. Sometimes they put so much time and energy into their plans that when she finally sees the entire map, she is stunned by the scope of it all. You never really know when that is going to happen. You start seeing the results, the effects, and it is just the tip of the iceberg, but you don't _know_ that it is only the tip. You think it's just another chunk of ice. Until suddenly it's not.

That's how Eric Plummer works.

When some of her former victims show up dead, together, laid out in a display on a body farm, she is spooked. It is absolutely too much of a coincidence, no matter how high risk some of them were. And seeing Clayton Derricks among them, the boy she'd put so _much_ hard work and effort into, breaks her heart. Clayton was one of her first, and she had really seen then how she could affect someone else's life. She had really seen how life could be unfair. She is angry and she is hurting and she is confused.

Elliot sprints into protective mode, and while she can't blame him, she begins to find it really annoying. He's never not been protective, and so she can't fairly blame it on the fact that they're sleeping together now, but it doesn't help either. She feels vulnerable and exposed and like her life is out of her control, and she hates that. She fights with him over the case, and then over her old cases, and when he tells her he's worried about her, she has to grit her teeth to keep from snapping at him. There is another murder, another old case, and they are all her failures, piling up. All her inner fears and her worries that she is not good enough. They are a spotlight on her ineptitude, and she's starting to feel like an idiot.

The local FBI offers a protective detail, and she refuses, because she is not going to let this get to her any more than it already does. She does _not_ need protection on top of her mistakes. Elliot argues with her, and she shuts him down, and for a few hours all she wants is to get away from him. He doesn't get how she's had to struggle for this job. He sees maybe more than most men, but he doesn't _know_. How, despite all the advancements, the NYPD is still a man's world and she has to work harder to gain the same respect he commands instantly by simply being male. Watching the worst of her work being paraded around is devastating.

"He is freeing them!" George waxes on enthusiastically, trying to profile their perpetrator.

"From what?" she demands, already weary.

"From the miserable existence you've left them in."

And that's about it, isn't it? That's pretty much what it's about. She fucked up, and for some victims it doesn't get better. And someone who might have good reason to hate her has decided to clean up after her, and he wants her to know about it. He wants her to see. He wants her to know her own weakness and be afraid.

And she is.

[]

She doesn't want to let Elliot in when he knocks that night. She doesn't want to talk about it to anyone. She just wants to sit down and think. She does let him in though, because in some ways she is glad she has him at her back, even if he's seeing the worst of her, and because if she doesn't let him in he will stand out there and knock all night. He's that stubborn.

"I want you to reconsider the protective detail," he says, when she's locked the door behind him.

She turns and gives him a sidelong glance as she walks into her kitchen. "No."

"Olivia," he says, angrily, as she opens the refrigerator and takes out a bottle of beer. "This guy isn't kidding around."

She clenches her jaw. What does he think, that she's having _fun_ with this? She twists open the beer, takes a swallow, and then slams it down on the counter in front of him. It slides toward his arm and splashes him with foam, and he swears and grabs it, and she walks past. "Neither am I," she retorts.

She walks as far away from him as the room will allow, and she leans against her wall and stares out her window, and he is quiet for a while and she feels him watching her.

"I'm worried about you," he says, finally, in a low voice.

"I know," she says.

She hears the quiet thunk as he sets the beer bottle down, and then the creak of her floor as he walks toward her, and then he's right there, standing in her personal space, his hands on the wall behind her. She is affected by him, still, even in her anger, but for the first time she also feels a little trapped. Stifled.

"I couldn't take it if something happened to you," he says softly. His hand slides onto the back of her neck, his knuckles cushioning her from the wall.

She keeps her eyes on the space between the slats on her blinds. The blinking of tail lights in the street below. "Something could happen to me any day. I'm a cop. You going to keep a protective detail on me the rest of my career?"

He sighs. "Olivia…"

"You need to back off," she warns him, and she pushes against his chest, forcing him to let her go and step back.

He stares at her, but he backs off a step, maybe two. No more. She takes a breath. "This is why I didn't want to sleep with you at first."

His brows furrow. "Why? Because I might actually care about you?"

"Because it would interfere with me doing my job!"

"Bullshit!" He steps closer again. "Fucking or not, Olivia, I care about my partner being hurt or killed!"

She runs a hand through her hair tiredly. "He's killing _my_ mistakes, Elliot. He's hurting people because of me. I am not going to run away and hide behind a line of FBI agents and leave them out there all alone."

"No one's telling you to do that."

"This is my responsibility."

He moves in close again, suddenly, and she's caught between him and the wall. She can smell his soap and his leather jacket and him, and she turns her head away, but he leans down close. "Look. I'm not going to pretend that my feelings for you have no bearing on this, but you're being too single-minded, Olivia. We want to keep you safe because we care about you. We want to help you solve this case. You always want to run off and do these things alone, and you don't have to!"

"I don't have much of a choice this time, do I?" She pushes past him, and he lets her go. She walks to the center of the living room and looks back at him. "I don't want a protective detail, Elliot. I'll take the help, but this is my case. I knew this guy. Somewhere in my past, I knew this guy, and you need to trust me to work this out and take care of myself."

He stares at her for a long time before he finally, slowly, nods, but he doesn't speak and he doesn't smile.

She lets him out a few minutes later, and he doesn't spend the night.

[]

Plummer's name comes up on a list of her former busts with a grudge. Even before she worked SVU, she put him away for rape only to have him found innocent when DNA evidence cleared him. It had been a hard pill to swallow, knowing she'd put an innocent man away for seven years before he'd been freed, but she _had_ swallowed it, because it hadn't been about her. It had been about Plummer, and he'd had the hard part. He'd been the one who'd had to serve time. She'd apologized and he'd looked at her as if he'd wanted to spit in her face, and she hadn't blamed him. She'd offered no excuses. As a cop she knows it happens, but it's just not an excuse. She'd simply walked away and tried to shove all the doubt about her own abilities aside. It didn't completely work. She still can't think about Eric Plummer without feeling a deep chasm of guilt. It's like an old wound that has never healed correctly. It rips open again each time her mind settles on him.

That he might be behind the murders is… overwhelming.

Elliot walks on eggshells around her, and she knows she is being as unbearable as he is most of the time. She is slower to anger, but she's never been less than an equal force, and sometimes they all forget that. She might be acting more on principle than she is on logic, and she knows that. She just can't seem to help herself. Can't bear to strip herself down for them. She will take this guy down, whether it's Plummer or someone else from her past.

For a while, Elliot's temper is nonexistent. He runs interference for her, but he is painfully obvious in his attempts at support, and it borders on patronizing and rubs her the wrong way. She has to wonder if she'd be feeling the same way if they weren't involved, and it's a hard question to answer because they've always been close. She's wavering on the cusp of talking to him about it, just opening up, when he does the unforgivable.

He's in a late meeting with the FBI and Cragen, and she goes for a beer with Munch and Fin. They do their duty and try to convince her that none of this is her fault, but she knows damn well that if it had been one of them they'd be thinking just like she is. All the same, they help. Be a detective long enough and you'll make a big mistake. It's inevitable, and that fact was driven home to her in spades during her Christmas fuck-up. You do the best you can, but no one is infallible. The pitcher of beer they share doesn't even make a dent in her mood, so she finally packs it in and leaves them there.

In the darkness of winter, she walks along the street toward her apartment and tries to clear her mind. When the footsteps echo behind her, she is instantly aware. When they continue on with her, she draws her Sig. When she whirls on him, it is not Plummer, but another man, unfamiliar, who throws his hands up in alarm as she shouts at him to freeze. The words he shouts back don't make sense for a moment as a car screeches to a halt next to them, and men start jumping out. She is distracted, but not by them. By the lone figure across the street, hesitating in a street light as he watches her.

Eric Plummer.

The man under her gun is still shouting though, and his words finally get through. "I'm FBI! I'm FBI!"

She looks at him in confusion, and when she looks back, Plummer is gone.

The chill he leaves behind settles deep in her bones.

[]

She makes them drive her to Elliot's flat. The agents don't ask questions but shoot her furtive looks, and she bristles under their scrutiny. She is so angry that he has ordered the protective detail anyway—against her wishes—after he stood there and nodded after she asked him to trust her, that she doesn't even care if they see her yell at him.

He answers the door in sweatpants and a T-shirt, sleep still in his eyes, and he steps outside barefoot, his gaze drawn warily—and knowingly—to the car of agents behind her.

She just wants him to explain himself, and he is stone. "This guy is killing people, Olivia, and he's after you." He says it as if it's the most logical thing in the world, and she can't quite grasp the situation.

She doesn't even know what to say. She wants to put a fist into his jaw. He is carefully schooling his expression as the agents look on, and so she just says, "If you can't trust your partner, Elliot, it's time to get a new one." And then she walks away.

[]

It all falls quickly after that. She doesn't talk to him the next day, and he won't apologize, so they just avoid each other. And she tells Cragen about Plummer, and while he believes her, he does not rush to action. The system moves slowly, and she is feeling a little battered now. Like blood in the water.

She takes some vacation time then. Because everyone keeps trying to tell her how she should be feeling, and she has a partner she can't trust any longer, and a man who has hurt her, and what she really wants to do is work this out herself. She knows, realistically, that it won't happen, that Cragen can't let it happen, and so she does the one thing she feels she can do. She stops the ride and gets off.

She just needs to think.

She doesn't get time to think long. She goes looking for Plummer and she finds him. She realizes then, as she steps into the apartment where he holds a woman hostage, his gun to her head, that this is the culmination of a plan that has taken seven years to work out. Seven years of false imprisonment and resentment—hatred—toward her. She is long past that tip of the iceberg, and so far everything has fallen into place just the way Plummer has planned it.

He points his gun at the innocent victim, and Olivia points her gun at him, and she begs him not to do this, and he is both furious and giddy. Furious at her, giddy that his plan is nearly complete.

"There are no bullets in my gun," he tells her, softly, gleefully. He wants her to shoot him. He wants to die, because he will belong to her then. He will be her greatest failure of all, and his blood will be on her hands, and she will rethink this and rethink this until she drives herself crazy.

And. She shoots him.

She can't do anything else. She can't trust his words that he has no bullets when he starts to squeeze the trigger and shoot the victim. She can't hesitate. She shoots him, and he dies, and the police rush in behind her, and there really are no bullets in Plummer's gun.

The culmination of his plan is complete, and there had been no way to avoid it. He is dead, but he still wins.

She is numb.

Elliot is there then, his hands on hers. He pushes her gun down and he takes it from her hands, and he speaks quietly to her, like he really cares about her, and she answers him because she is on autopilot now. But when he tries to lead her away, she cannot bear it. "You," she orders. "Leave me alone."

And she walks away from him.

He tries. That night, after she gives her statement and she sits at home, the rain pouring down outside. She sits in the darkness and she thinks about Eric Plummer's plan and how it all evolved. How she played into it. She thinks about how she could have done things differently, in his original criminal case, in all of her old cases, in the situation with the hostage. Elliot knocks on her door, and he calls, and he yells at her to let him in, and she doesn't move. Because she can be the same stone that he is.

Eventually, he gives up.

And that's when she lets herself break.

[]

She doesn't take any more time off. She goes back because she can't think of anything else to do. Cragen talks to her, and tries to get a sense of her sanity, she thinks, but she doesn't have much to say. To him or to Elliot.

Department procedure dictates she take desk duty while her shooting is investigated. She and Elliot catch up on paperwork, and he stares at her over their desks and his leg jitters a million miles an hour underneath, and she is unaffected by all of it.

"Would you talk to me?" he asks, in a rough whisper, when there is a lull in the action around them.

She stops working for a moment, staring down at the papers on her desk. She feels useless and helpless and utterly alone. She wants to slide her arms around him and let him take her pain away, but just looking at him makes her hurt all over again. He didn't trust her. He went behind her back and did something she explicitly told him not to do. She can't even think about it, because it makes her eyes sting with her emotion. When he was struggling with the job and his temper, Cragen asked her to roll over on him, and she didn't. She had his back, and she trusted him when he said he was okay. And he repays her... with this?

She doesn't answer him. Or look at him. And he finally gets up and walks away.

[]

He's sitting on her front steps when she gets home that night. She hesitates in the middle of the street, when she sees him there, half wanting to turn around before he sees her and escape. But she can't run away from him forever, and she knows she's going to have to deal with this eventually. _I knew it,_ she thinks as she walks toward him. _I knew this would happen. It always happens. It never lasts._

"Hey," he says, softly, standing as she approaches.

She doesn't say anything at first. She just stands in front of him and waits.

He licks his lips nervously and looks into her eyes and asks, "You going to be okay?"

She holds his gaze for a moment, and then finally answers, "Yeah."

He exhales slowly. "I can't apologize, Liv. I'd do it again. I'd do whatever it takes to keep you safe."

She swallows, and her hurt flares again. "You didn't trust me."

"I trusted you," he insists. "I didn't trust Plummer. I didn't trust myself to keep you out of his sights."

She stares at him and shakes her head. "It wasn't up to you, Elliot. It was my decision."

"You're so stubborn," he argues, but with no venom in his voice.

She wants to laugh at that. At him calling her stubborn, when she's backed him up again and again, covering for him with Cragen whenever he grabbed a hold of a case and wouldn't let go, even when ordered to. Sometimes they are more alike than different.

He bows his head for a moment and then he looks at her, and his jaw is tight and his eyes are hurt and angry and everything in between. "I couldn't let him get at you. Not when I could prevent it. I'd rather have you hate me than have you dead, Olivia."

She stares at him for a long time, trying to swallow her hurt. "I don't hate you," she admits, because even at her angriest she could never tell him that. "But how do you expect me to trust you now?"

He still looks both angry and hurt, and she feels frustrated that he doesn't seem to understand her point of view.

"Can we get by this?" he asks, quietly.

She answers honestly, because she can't imagine being otherwise with him. "I don't know," she says, and she can hear the pain in her own voice.

She walks past him then, and into her apartment foyer, and he doesn't follow.

[]

It's a quiet week after that.

They still talk, but it tends to stay focused on their work. He is quiet and serious and distant, and she only notices half the time, when she isn't still remembering Eric Plummer's voice telling her there are no bullets in his gun. She looks up sometimes, and catches Elliot watching her. He doesn't look away immediately when she catches him, he only presses his lips together in a faint, grim sort of smile, and then he gradually looks away. It makes her feel curiously afraid, not of him, but for him. For herself. Six months ago he'd have cornered her somewhere and forced the issue. Not always her favorite way of handling things, but it was something she'd understood about him. Now, he is closed off and still.

She is still mad at him, but it battles with her affection and her loyalty. She holds onto the anger during the day, but she wakes in the night feeling his mouth on her skin and smelling him on her sheets, and she cannot stop the drop of her stomach when she realizes he is not there.

Surprisingly, they still have some remnant of their partnership left. Maybe they've learned it so well that they can now do it in their sleep. When she is finally cleared of fault in Plummer's shooting case, and Cragen lets her back out on the street, she and Elliot still work okay. It is quiet and there are things there between them that cannot be put away again, but they can talk in the neutral terms of their job, and they can get each other's back without thinking about it.

All the same, it is not something that can last, and she knows it. He is waiting for her for now, and she has to decide.

[]

She isn't sure at the end if he means to take the decision out of her hands or not. Maybe he doesn't even know himself. He's been falling for a long time now, and she's been treading water with him, trying to keep his head above the waves. But now he sinks, and though she is not with him, there is still a thread that binds them together. She can follow him down or she can cut the cord, and neither option, in the end, appeals to her.

Two weeks after Eric Plummer dies, she is starting to wake up from her dream. Spring is heavy in the air, and instead of being the season of birth, it is the time that everything ends.

Cragen calls her on a Sunday morning and tells her to come in, he'll meet her at the precinct. When she gets there, he is waiting, and he tells her that Bronx police found Justine Foster's body in an alley early that morning. She's already been identified by her parents. Her heart drops into her stomach.

"Shit," she swears, and Cragen only nods.

"When Elliot gets here, you two get out there and see what you can find," he says, and she feels her heart drop even lower because Elliot doesn't know yet.

"I'll tell him," she says, meeting Cragen's gaze.

He looks skeptical. "Maybe it's better if it comes from me, Olivia. He hasn't been himself lately."

She just fixes him with an unyielding stare and he sighs.

When Elliot comes in, still in his church clothes, she follows him into the locker room. He glances at her as she stands apart from him, and starts taking his shirt off without missing a beat. "What do we got?"

She takes a breath, watching as he hangs his shirt on a hook and grabs another. "They found Justine Foster this morning."

He freezes for a long moment, and she gives it to him, watching as he tilts his head down and swallows and prepares himself. Then he grabs the door of his locker and stares into it, carefully not looking at her, and she watches the muscles in his bare back flex a bit as he breathes. He knows what's coming. "And?" he asks, voice rough.

"She's dead, El."

He keeps himself carefully turned away from her, and he stands there, still and silent, for a long minute. And then he nods, slowly, but she hears his breathing getting louder, and he moves, restlessly, from foot to foot and he glances around and she hears a wet sound in his throat, once, and then… Then he is only a blur of motion. She hears the startling, loud _BANG_ of his fist hitting the locker, once, then again and again, and she thinks at first that he is hitting the metal so hard he is stripping the paint off, but then she realizes that it is blood. And she's stepping forward and grabbing his shoulder, grabbing his arms, and he tries to shake her off, but she crowds him into the corner, and then he finally stops and he still won't look at her. He turns his head to the side and closes his eyes and grits his teeth, and she doesn't know what to do, because they are broken now. So she rests her forehead against his shoulder and keeps his wrists tightly in her fingers, and they both just breathe for a little while.

[]

"I should have taken that bastard out," Elliot growls as she drives them to the scene. "Fuck the job. I should have grabbed David Jordan by the ankles and dangled him off the roof and told him if he didn't tell us where Roger was, he could splash all over the street below."

"Elliot," she says, firmly now, because he's past the point of responding to softness. "We had nothing on him. There was nothing. We still aren't even one hundred percent sure it was Roger who abducted her!"

"You know goddamned well it was them," he retorts. " Both of them! You have the same sixth sense I do. You _know_ that asshole knew something!"

She's trying to be logical about this, but he's right. She had been just as sure as he was. "You can't be a vigilante. We have to follow the rules."

"The rules don't work when kids are still dying!"

"And breaking the rules doesn't work when innocent people are put away," she responds.

He just shakes his head and clenches his fists and his jaw, and she can feel that dark, violent energy rolling off of him, and for the first time in maybe their entire partnership, she feels unsure of him. She feels apprehensive and a little uneasy.

He's okay at the scene. Justine's body is already at the morgue, where it had already been identified, and the Bronx detectives are working it. She talks to them while Elliot walks the scene. It's a dump job, not the scene of death, and they're willing to hand the case over. She calls it in, and Cragen says he'll get Munch and Fin over to the appropriate Bronx precinct to pick up the evidence. So she and Elliot head to the morgue.

Justine's parents are still there, sitting in the waiting area, clinging to each other, crying, and when they look up at her and Elliot, there is accusation in their eyes. _You didn't find her. You failed us. You could have saved her and you didn't._

And they are right. She and Elliot did the best they could, but in the end it hadn't been enough. The only thing they can do now is catch the perpetrator and give the Fosters someone to truly focus their rage on. In time they may or may not be okay with the SVU unit, but that was the price they all paid in this job. All of them.

Elliot grows eerily silent as they view Justine's body. The M.E. gives them a preliminary rundown, but says he'll transfer the body to Manhattan so Melinda can do the autopsy. He gives them a little plastic inhaler in an evidence bag. "This was in her pocket."

It is the strongest evidence yet, and Olivia signs for it, and then they talk to Justine's parents. She apologizes, Elliot apologizes, and there is no give in the Fosters. They are grieving parents, and she thinks that the best thing to do is leave them alone and work the case. Elliot follows her as she walks away.

She tries to talk on the drive back to the one six, but he doesn't answer her. He sits silent and tense and very, very still in the passenger seat, and when she glances at his hands, his knuckles are bleeding again, the red smeared across his fingers and the back of his hand. She wants to stop and get the first aid kit out of the trunk and take care of him, but he is still rolling in that barely restrained rage that is making her uneasy. She is afraid to touch him. She is outside of that bubble of safety that used to grant her safe passage. Before, whenever he'd gotten angry, he'd been mad at the world, and she was part of him, part of the inner circle that he would defend to the death. And now she feels what it is like to be outside of that, and it is scarily ominous.

"Elliot," she finally says, as she parks at the one six and turns the car off. "Please don't do anything impulsive. We will get this guy."

He sits still for a moment in the silence, before looking at her, and he has managed to turn himself to stone again, but not before she sees the glint of emotion in his eyes. He turns to climb out, and she wants to call to him and say, _"We'll work this out, El. I can't just let you go. You mean too much."_ But she is not at all sure that he will even understand her words, so she bites her lip and follows him in.

[]

The techs go to work on the inhaler, and in just a few hours they figure out that it was not sold in any pharmacy in New York. That it was probably bought online through a Canadian pharmacy. Cragen takes over from there, and eventually they have a name and an address. The address is just a post office box; the name is most likely an alias. It will take a stakeout of the box to see if Roger Jordan will reveal himself.

"That's too late," Elliot warns Cragen, darkly. "He could grab someone else by then, and maybe he'll never come back to that box."

"It's the best lead we have right now," Cragen says.

Elliot just says nothing then, and she glances at him uneasily.

Cragen sends Elliot down to talk to Melinda, and keeps Olivia in his office and puts her in charge of the stakeout. He takes a breath before asking, "How's he doing with this?"

She starts to lie again, and then she stops, because she is suddenly really worried. Maybe not for the first time, but certainly her strongest feeling yet, she feels like something bad might happen to Elliot, and it makes every nerve ending in her body feel wire-taut and almost painful. If this is how he felt when he put that protective detail on her, against her will or not… Jesus.

"I don't know," she answers.

"Find out," Cragen orders.

She nods and goes out to start organizing the stakeout. But less than an hour later, Melinda calls and wants to know when Elliot is going to get there. She has a meeting in 20 minutes and can't wait around all day.

Her breath stops in her lungs. She has a sinking feeling that she knows where Elliot has gone, and in his state of mind, she is truly frightened. She tells Warner that someone else will be down, and then she asks Munch to run down and do it. He starts to ask the question, and then he stops when he sees her expression. "Maybe you should tell Cragen," he says.

"I can't," she says. "Not yet. Let me take care of it."

He only nods and walks out of the room, trying to look casual. She hits Cragen's office and tells him she's going out for a while, and he looks up absently and then nods, and she manages to walk until she reaches the parking garage, and then she runs.

[]

David Jordan's townhouse is quiet on a late Sunday afternoon. Elliot's car is parked outside, and just seeing it causes her spirits to sink. Jordan had a maid and a few assistants she remembered from their first visit, but Sundays are probably their day off, and when she rings the bell, no one answers. When she tries the doorknob, it swings open, and she rests her hand on her gun, but doesn't draw it. She creeps inside.

It is silent at first, and then she hears the deep undertones of Elliot's voice, so she heads toward him. This is potentially career-ending for him, and there is another first in her mind as she thinks that maybe that wouldn't be such a bad idea. She doesn't care now if he's her partner or not, if he's in SVU or not. She just wants him to be alive and free and _well_. She can be partners with someone else, and Elliot can still be in her life, and at least he will be _living_. He will not eat his gun and he will not end up in prison and he will not be shot because he is being reckless and impulsive and unable to control his rage.

She turns a corner into a small hallway behind the main staircase, and they are there. Jordan breathing hard, face against the wall, a look of terror on his face, and Elliot with one hand on Jordan's neck, keeping him pinned, the other holding his gun and pressing the barrel hard against Jordan's skull.

_Oh, fuck. Oh, fuck, fuck, fuck. _

"That's bullshit, David," Elliot growls. "And we both know it. You know exactly where he is, and you're going to tell me, right fucking now."

"I swear I don't know," David pleads. "He makes sure _not_ to tell me where he is, so I _can't_ tell!"

"Yeah?" Elliot digs the metal barrel in deeper and David grimaces. "Then that's too bad."

"Elliot!" She steps out, and he doesn't even glance at her.

"You shouldn't be here," he says. "Turn around now and leave, and no one will know."

She walks toward him, unafraid because it's still Elliot, and he is scaring her but she still can't quite believe he'd kill a suspect deliberately. "You know I won't," she says, softly.

"He knows where that asshole is," Elliot says.

"I don't!" David insists, and Elliot pushes him harder against the wall.

She walks slowly, approaching them, and Elliot finally glances at her, his eyes into hers, and she can see the pain and it cuts her. Sharply. _Way too much_, she thinks. _And way too long_. His time here is finished. Cragen had been right. He would never admit that he'd had enough. His point of view was skewed, and he hadn't wanted to leave her. She hadn't wanted him to leave her. She shouldn't have trusted his word. She should have trusted her own desire to keep him safe.

"El," she says. "You've got to stop now."

"All he has to do is tell me where Roger is."

"We know where Roger is," she says. "Or, at least, we know where he will be. We can find him now."

Elliot says nothing, but she can see the weariness in his face.

"This isn't you," she says, very softly, because she hates that Jordan gets to listen in. "Enough."

He looks at her now, holds her gaze directly, his blue eyes resentful. "You think I'm a whack job now?" He's sarcastic.

"No."

He stares at her, and then he's lifting the barrel of his gun, his hand still pressing Jordan into the wall. "Maybe you should," he says, and then he's gone, walking past her, leaving her and David Jordan standing in the hallway staring at each other.

[]

He doesn't come in the next day, and when she calls his cell he doesn't answer. David Jordan doesn't call in and complain, and that more than anything convinces her that when they find Roger, they will find out a lot more about David than he wants them to know. Cragen asks her about Elliot, and she tells him he's taking the case hard and she doesn't know where he is, but he needs the time off. And then she sits and worries and does her shift on the stakeout.

They catch Roger the next morning. He tries to sneak into the post office at 4 a.m. when he thinks no one will be there. When Fin nabs him, he has the key to the box and a picture of Justine in his pocket. She lets Fin handle the interrogation, and Roger breaks quickly, easily giving up David in his bid for leniency. He knows how the system works. David helped pick out the victim, gave Roger money and instructions, and they shared the bounty. She tries to call Elliot, but he still doesn't answer, so she and Cragen go to pick David up. She doesn't know then, if he'll spill about Elliot or not, but there's nothing she can do.

He squawks a little bit about police brutality, but mostly just tries to blame it all on Roger, and Cragen doesn't even ask her if it's true.

"He has so many charges right now that I can make that go away," he tells her. "I've done worse. Don't tell me anything else."

She realizes that Elliot will probably be safe. At least from that charge. She also realizes what she has to do, should have already done. And Cragen beats her to it.

"Tell me the truth, Olivia," he says, quietly. And she sighs.

"He's done," she tells him, softly.

Cragen nods, and his shoulders seem to sag a bit in relief. "I know it's hard," he says.

She thinks that she really hates irony. And if she could have that moment back again, she'd ask for the goddamn protective detail herself, so he wouldn't have to. She rubs tiredly at her forehead. "He'd do anything for these victims, Captain. He doesn't deserve this."

"He deserves to be happy," Cragen says, vehemently. "Before you transferred in, he was the best detective I had. Now you're the best detective I have, and don't think for a moment that I don't credit Elliot with that. He did exactly what he needed to do. He made you better than he is."

She swallows and stays silent.

"I'll do what I can for him, okay?" he says.

She nods, absently, and then says, "Can you give me a day or two to find him first? Let me talk to him. If he puts in for a transfer himself…"

"Do it," Cragen says immediately. "I can play off vacation days for him until then, but you're going to have to find him fast."

She nods and he dismisses her, and she calls Elliot's cell phone again and leaves another message when he doesn't answer. She's grabbing her coat to drive to his place, when the phone on her desk rings, startling her.

She answers it. "Detective Benson."

"Olivia, this is Kathy Stabler." And her breath stops in her lungs for a moment.

"Oh," she says, her heart pounding. "Hi." She has met Elliot's ex-wife a few times, knows that she kept his name for the sake of the kids. But she can't imagine any reason why Kathy would call her unless it was about Elliot, and that scares her.

"I, um…" Kathy sighs. "I think you're the right person to call about this. The way he talks about you…" She takes another moment, and Olivia swallows. "You care about him."

"Kathy, what…"

"Do you know where he is?" Kathy asks suddenly.

Olivia hesitates, unsure for a moment whether she needs to cover Elliot's ass or admit the truth. "No," she finally says. "I don't."

"I do."

Her heart speeds up. "Where is he, Kathy? It's been… It's been a difficult few months."

"I just want you to know, I'd do it myself, I really would. I don't hate him at all. I just… we got divorced for a reason, okay? And running around trying to pick up all his pieces is something I can't do anymore. I couldn't even do it when we were married, and I really do not want to start again now. Not if there's someone else."

"Kathy, where is he?" Olivia demands, her tone a little more impatient now.

"He's at Holy Family."

"Your church?"

"Yes. Father Jacobs called me. I guess he didn't know who else to call. Elliot's been there all afternoon, for hours, and he won't talk to anyone. The Father is worried about him."

Olivia stares over at his empty desk and takes a breath. He's slipping beyond her grasp. Has slipped already, maybe too far. She feels lead in her stomach. This has to end, for his own good. As much as it will hurt. "Okay," she says, quietly.

"You'll go talk to him?"

"Yes."

"You know where the church is?"

"Yeah."

It's silent for a moment and then Kathy says, "Thanks, Olivia. Like I said, I'd do it, but I think you know him better than I do these days. And the two of you…"

"It's okay," Olivia interjects, not wanting to get into a discussion of their relationship with his ex. "I'm going to go now, Kathy, okay?"

"Okay. Thanks."

"Yeah." Olivia hangs up and then sits for a moment, just breathing.

[]

She doesn't attend church as a rule. Not since she was a kid, and even then her mother was sporadic about it, depending on her state of sobriety at the moment.

She is assailed by the deeply ingrained scent of incense as she walks through the doors. The high ceilings and the cavernous hall cause the silence to seem big and almost alive. She feels too aware of herself in churches. Too alone inside her own head.

Elliot is sitting in the front, halfway down the third pew. There are a few other patrons sitting and praying, but they are scattered around and silent. The priest—she assumes it is Father Jacobs—is standing off to the side, and when he makes eye contact with her, it is with relief. He motions toward Elliot, and she nods.

She pauses just behind Elliot's pew, watching him. He is staring at the crucifix over the altar, but his posture tells her he is a million miles away.

She sits down next to him. His eyes shift toward her and then back again, and he says nothing.

"We got Roger," she says. "And David."

His shoulders rise and fall as he breathes.

"I don't think the thing with David is going to hurt you," she tells him.

"It doesn't matter," he says, and his voice sounds scratchy and unused. It makes all her fear for him, all her affection boil up inside of her, and she aches.

_God_, she thinks, or maybe she's praying since they're inside a church. _Let him be all right._

They are silent for a while, and she listens to the church, the way she can seem to hear the air move. "You worried me," she says, quietly.

"I love you," he rasps.

She stops breathing for a moment, overwhelmed. And she wonders about his confession, if it's somehow consecrated by this place. She still cannot breathe, and her heart is breaking, she realizes. She can feel it splintering. "I love you too." It feels like everything is spilling out of her when she says it out loud.

He closes his eyes.

"It's time, Elliot," she finally says.

He doesn't even ask what she means. He just suddenly exhales, slowly, and then his shoulders slump. "Don't give up on me, Olivia," he whispers.

His hand is resting on his knee, and she slides her hand underneath his, palm up so she can lace her fingers with his. "I couldn't even if I tried."

His fingers close around hers. "I can't leave you alone doing this job."

"So, don't," she says. "Leave the job, El. Don't leave me."

His hand tightens around hers. "Is that an option?" he asks.

"Yes," she says, and it feels like the weight of the world slips off of her as she says it. "Yes," she repeats, because it is what she wants. What's she's always wanted. She just needed to find her own way to it.

He breathes deeply, and then he nods.

She takes his hand and presses his knuckles to her lips for one brief moment, the scars overridden with new scabs. Then she stands and tugs. "Come on."

He stands, and she leads him out to the main aisle, and they walk slowly toward the door. "Where are we going?" he asks.

She pushes the big wooden doors open and they walk outside into the bright spring sunshine, and she thinks of the one word that will always be tied up between them.

"Home," she says.

 

[]


	6. Believe

You close your eyes over us. And the sun rises everywhere. Cause I believe in what you are. I believe in you.

Part six - Epilogue

[]

The car's air conditioning is broken and has been broken for a week now. In the stilted heat of late July it makes them both grumpy.

It's okay though. Neither one of them wants to talk much tonight. The sun is low in the sky and it was another late day. It's finally cooling off and they have every window of the car rolled down, the wind whipping through their hair. She took a shower before leaving the precinct and she can still smell the soap on her own skin. Rush hour has gone by and they cross the bridge into Queens easily.

The single shot of brandy she had after work still burns in her throat, but it did little to muffle her mood. She's still angry. Still frustrated. Still feeling a little lost and hopeless.

It's better when they finally turn down his street.

Fin stops the car in front of the townhouse and glances at her and asks, "You okay, Liv?"

She glances back and shrugs and shakes her head. She doesn't know how to answer that.

He says, "Yeah, I know."

"You?" she asks, because they take care of each other now, and she never thought she could feel as protective of another partner as she was of Elliot, but she does. She will throw the fuck _down_ if anyone messes with Fin.

He shakes his head and his jaw is tight, and like Elliot it's always been the kids that get to him. "Fuck that shit," he swears.

She nods and she reaches out and squeezes his forearm. He gives her a half smile. He doesn't like to be touched, but she can get away with it now.

"We have court tomorrow," she reminds him. "Not until ten though. Take it easy and sleep in."

"You need me to pick you up tomorrow?"

"Nah," she says. She knows he won't be going home tonight. If he has to come all the way out to pick her up he'll lose at least an hour of that extra sleep. She motions toward the townhouse. "I'll ride in with El and catch an hour or two in the crib. Wake me up when you get there."

"Okay," he says. "Now get the fuck out. I'm sweating through my socks."

She grins then, her anger dispersing for just a moment. She climbs out and he drives away, and she stands there for a moment, in the growing darkness, listening to the crickets. It's so much quieter out here in Queens. More than she'd thought it would be. She likes it. You can still hear the comforting sounds of traffic and people, but it gets still too. It's still hot and humid, even at 8 o'clock at night, and it brings the day's anger back to her. She walks slowly toward the porch and she wants to kick something. Anything.

There are days when all the evil in the world seems to coil inside of her like a snake, writhing in her gut and threatening to spill outward. It's a feeling she hates. "It was a bad day," Fin had said as he'd handed her the glass of brandy. "Tomorrow will be better." And she'd nodded, because they both knew the rhythm by now.

When she opens the door, the coolness of the house hits her. She steps quickly inside and stands in the foyer for a moment. It's silent in the flat, although the lights are on. She hears the soft whoosh of the air conditioner kicking on, and it's soothing in a weird way. She looks around though, and she doesn't know quite what to do.

"Hey." Elliot walks out of the bedroom, and his hair is still wet. He's in shorts and nothing else, and her gaze slides along his shoulders, his arms, down over the hard curve of his thighs.

She doesn't answer him, she's feeling too antisocial. He looks at her curiously and comes close enough to slide a hand against her jaw and press his mouth against hers.

She explodes then.

She grabs the back of his head and pushes her tongue into his mouth, and he grunts in surprise but then his arms become iron. She's got him up against the wall, and she's kissing him hard, and she slides one palm down over his stomach and into his shorts, and he huffs out a quiet laugh into her mouth. Then he bites her bottom lip. She sucks her breath in, but it only makes the lust flare a little brighter.

"Get in the fucking bedroom," he orders, roughly. He pushes her along the hallway, and he's tugging at her shirt, untucking it so he can slide his hands over her bare back. When they back into the bedroom, he jerks at her belt, unbuckling it almost violently before he unbuttons her jeans and shoves them down. She kicks them away, and then he has her around the waist and he yanks her into the air and twists around and heaves her onto the bed, coming down on top of her. She scrambles to straighten herself out, but he's already between her legs, his fingers grabbing at her underwear and his mouth biting at her jaw and then sliding down, sucking hard at her nipples.

She exhales, loud, hard. Her fingers curl into his shoulders. Her heart is pounding and her adrenalin is pumping and she arches up against him, feeling remarkably ready to fight. His hand slides down between her legs and she is too wound up to lay still. He manages to get two fingers inside of her, and she can feel how wet she is, and even in her desperation he is still trying to be nice, and she growls, "Fuck you, Elliot!" As she moves away from his hand, because she doesn't want _that_.

He just pushes her back down and then his hand is shoving the front of his shorts down. He guides his cock right to her, nudging the crotch of her panties aside, and then he's pressing hard inside of her. She swallows and closes her eyes, and he thrusts as hard as he can, until he's deep and she feels that brief, sharp pain that always comes with the first stroke. He hesitates then, but only to steady himself and rise up on his arms. Then he's rocking against her, and all she can feel is how good it is, how fully it overwhelms everything else in her mind. He's breathing hard, and she is too, and she lifts her legs to wrap them around his waist so he doesn't push her off the bed.

She moans, softly.

He knows how to move. How to make her come like this, with no foreplay and no hands fumbling between them. It's easier when she's in this mood, but they've had a while to get it right. In a few long minutes she is unwinding and wearing out, her muscles aching and the pleasure pooling down low and drifting outward.

"God, you feel good," he says, breathlessly, against her ear. And that's the beginning of the end.

She wraps her arms around him, and he lets his weight come down a bit more. She moves with him, and he switches to deep, hard and short, and her fingers ache as she presses them painfully into his back. Tight, tighter, tighter, and then she's flexing and the wave is taking her and she's coming hard enough to stop breathing for a while. He groans against her neck, forcing himself to keep moving when she knows he'd rather just press her down and come, and when she collapses limply underneath him, he does just that. She scrapes her nails against his scalp as he pants against her skin.

"Fuck, Olivia," he swears, softly, when he finally slides off of her and lies tiredly beside her.

And she closes her eyes and takes a deep, relieved breath at the soreness in her muscles.

The anger has seeped away and she won't let it back in. Not tonight.

[]

She's grown to love his backyard. It's too small to do anything worthwhile, but it's quiet and she can see the stars when it's dark out, despite the city lights.

She sits on the back step in shorts and a tank top and she sips a cold beer and the heat of the night feels comfortable. She keeps the porch light turned off to confuse the mosquitoes, and she looks up at the sky, and she feels that familiar melancholy.

The door opens behind her, and then Elliot sits down on the step above her, settling her between his legs. He twists the cap off his own bottle of beer, and she feels his mouth press briefly against the back of her head.

"How was your day, dear?" she asks, wryly.

He exhales a laugh against her hair. "Not bad," he says. "Spent all day running down witnesses for the Warrick homicide."

"Catch a break?"

He sighs. "Nope. Not yet." He takes a swig of his beer and then says, "I heard today that John is sleeping with his new partner."

She lifts her eyebrows. Rumors fly fast. "No," she states. "_Fin_ is sleeping with John's new partner."

"Really?" His voice sounds a little salacious. "And after he gave us all that shit when he found out we were sleeping together."

"I know," she agrees, smiling. "But Dani has him all tied up in knots. It's pretty hilarious actually."

He laughs quietly. "Matt wants us to go up to Maine with him and Lisa for vacation. Big fishing trip."

She snorts at that. She likes Elliot's new partner, and his new job in homicide, but spending a week in Maine fishing? That'll be the day.

"Maybe we should think about it," Elliot says.

"Fishing?" she asks, incredulously. "You've been fishing, what? Maybe twice in your life?"

"I did it a lot in the Marines," he protests. "When I was stationed in South Carolina."

"I don't even like fish that much," she grumbles.

"You need time off," he says, quietly.

She gets still and stops talking.

His hand slides soothingly onto the back of her neck. "What's going on, Liv?"

She swallows and rubs wearily at the bridge of her nose. "It's fine."

He exhales slowly. "You know the rules."

She sighs.

He nudges against the back of her head with his forehead. "You don't have to talk about it," he reminds her. "But you gotta tell me what's going on."

"We lost the Raskin case this morning," she says. "They threw out our search warrant and everything we found with it."

"Fuck, Liv," he says. "I'm sorry."

She shrugs. It happens. She sighs.

"What else?" he demands, and she should have known he'd realize there is more.

She pauses for a moment, taking a long drink of her beer. "A woman left her three-year-old in her car this afternoon while she ran into the bar to meet a date," she tells him. "The boy was dead when we got there."

He exhales slowly, and slides his arm around her neck. "Shit," he says.

"I don't get it," she says. "How does anyone, in this day and age, not understand that leaving a kid in a hot car in the summertime is going to kill them? It's just common fucking sense!"

"I don't know," he says. "I don't get it either." She kicks at a twig at the step by her feet and his arm tightens around her. "You wanna talk about it?"

She thinks about it and then shakes her head. "Maybe later," she says. "I feel better now, after…" She trails away, and he presses his lips against the nape of her neck. She's a bit amazed at how easily they've fallen into this relationship, how deeply they understand each other. When she comes home angry enough, she needs to fight, and he knows how to handle her. When he comes home angry, she knows to let him simmer for a while, and that when the lights go out it'll be a long night. Sometimes he needs the cuffs, sometimes he's okay, and none of it has the desolate tinge that he used to get when he was in SVU.

They made The Rules when she started staying at his place more than her own, even though she's been hanging onto her apartment so far. They both know how bad cases go, and they both know how they can tear up a relationship. They can talk as much or as little about the bad ones as they want, but they have to tell the other what's really going on. It's hard, but ironically, once she actually tells him what's up, she finds it much easier to talk about it. She can be as random as she wants, throw a comment out while they make dinner, and he knows exactly what she's talking about. She doesn't have to take the time to set it up, tell him the details. He already knows. It may not always work, but it works for now, and that's good enough.

"Think about Maine," he urges. "We can take a week in September maybe. Matt's family runs a resort up there on a lake. Bunch of cottages and stuff. You don't have to fish," he adds.

She smiles at that. "I can just sleep in and lay around all day?"

"Fuck yes."

"Maybe," she finally relents.

She feels him smile against the skin of her shoulder. They finish their beers in silence, and she listens to the crickets.

When she finally sets the bottle aside, he takes her by the hand and leads her inside, and she climbs tiredly into bed while he walks around the house, checking the doors. When he turns the light off and climbs in beside her, she takes a deep breath and feels the weight of the day start to slip away. This time he is gentle, and she revels in that. He kisses her for a long time, and his hands are soft and he makes her gasp and moan with his mouth. He pulls her on top of him and lets her set the pace, slow and almost agonizing, and when she comes she tells him she loves him.

He says it back when he catches his breath again, and his fingers circle her left wrist. He closes his eyes in the darkness and his thumb finds her left ring-finger, and he strokes it in a deliberate way. She feels a wave of warmth. It's not something they've talked about yet, but he is not shy about his intentions. He falls asleep long before she does. She listens to him breathe as she hangs in that hazy space between sleep and wakefulness.

She thinks that in some ways it was he who saved her, long before she took his hand and led him out of that church. In some ways he was her salvation.

And in all ways, he is utterly and completely her home.

~fin~

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading, and I hope you enjoyed the fic. :)
> 
> You know, this was for the kink-bigbang on LJ, and while it isn't really hardcore kink, nor even strict BDSM, I tried to treat the topic with respect and realism. These are two people who probably know more about the topic than the typical non-kinky human, and they see a lot of the aftermath when things go badly. They're two rather dark people trying to find their way, and so while I don't see them going for the 'lifestyle', I do see them finding certain things hot and a bit of a relief and struggling to find their own way. I hope that came through.


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